Building Health &
Legal Literacy

This lesson develops students health and legal knowledge, the services available to them, and the barriers young people face in accessing services. 

Learning intentions:

  • Develop an awareness of health and legal services available to young people in the community 
  • Understand the barriers many young people face to accessing these community-based services 
  • Understand referral pathways to community-based services
  • Increased health and legal literacy

Digital Educator: Mei

  • 12-30 learners

    Class size
  • 11+

    Year Level
  • 60 minutes

    Course duration
  • One

    Student Handouts

    Preparing for the lesson

    Information
    Resources
    ACHPE Objectives
    UNESCO Objectives
    Safety & Wellbeing
    Sequence
    Extension
    In this Building Health & Legal Literacy lesson, students will develop skills in relation to the concepts of health literacy, help seeking and barriers to service.

    The lesson will begin with a knowledge-building segment, discussing health literacy and the issues low health literacy can cause. Students will work in pairs to research local services across a range of health and legal categories, identifying accessibility and barriers to access. For the remainder of the lesson students will design their own service that addresses the many barriers that young people face accessing health and legal services. 

    Each lesson ends with a consolidation activity, inviting students to list 1 thing they have learnt from the lesson, 1 thing they already knew, 1 piece of advice they would share with a friend, and 1 adult or organisation that would be helpful in relation to the lesson topic.  

    Facilitator Printouts

    Student Printouts

    Additional Resources

    We Keep It Zipped (Confidentiality in New Zealand Health Care)
    Not applicable. 
    Key Concept 5: Skills for Health and Wellbeing 
    5.5 Finding Help and Support.
    • Key idea: Everyone has the right to affordable, factual and respectful assistance that maintains confidentiality and protects privacy.
    • Some students in your class will already be accessing the services they are researching. You will need to use protective interrupting at times to limit self-disclosure. However, it is also beneficial for students to normalise help seeking and accessing services so some degree of self-disclosure should be allowed. You will need to use your professional judgement in this instance. 
    • Designing a health service can be turned into a larger assessment piece that requires research and development.
    Ideally, you will have scope to deliver all of the lessons in your program. However we understand that many schools have limited capacity to do so.

    In Year 11 and 12 you can deliver lessons from either year level. It can be helpful for Year 12's to explore more foundational issues in the Year 11 curriculum. It is also beneficial for Year 11's to have access to more advanced lessons from the Year 12 curriculum.  

    Should you find yourself having to implement part of this program, we have provided a suggested sequence of lessons within the broader skills and knowledge categories of relationship, consent, gender, and health & legal literacy. We recommend delivering at least one lesson from each category.

    Group Agreements & Pod Mapping should be the first lesson as per best practice.