Long-term commitment: Permanent Secretary for Education & Manpower Fanny Law encourages all schools to make health promotion a long-term objective of their development.

All schools should make health promotion a long-term objective of their development, Permanent Secretary for Education & Manpower Fanny Law says.

Speaking today at the opening ceremony of My Pledge to Act - Live Hygiene Live Health at Queen's College and CCC Heep Woh Primary School, Mrs Law said the key to achieving the objective lay in teaching students about personal and environmental cleanliness, and making it a permanent part of their lives.

She said training should start from childhood and be sustained to make them form good health habits.

The pledge scheme aims to encourage students to adopt a healthy lifestyle through collective commitment.

Describing it as a long-term development strategy, Mrs Law called on schools to lead their students at the start of each school year in September in giving a pledge of keeping good health, maintaining a clean environment and making other commitments like contributing to community work.

She hoped schools will implement follow-up programmes each year to realise the pledge and encourage students to become good citizens.

Organised by the Education & Manpower Bureau to tie in with the long-term measures recommended by Team Clean, the scheme has been joined by a number of secondary and primary schools, and kindergartens.

Apart from signing the pledge today, many of them organised whole-school physical-exercise sessions and classroom and campus clean-ups.

To help participating schools design an action plan to substantiate the significance of the scheme, relevant resources are available on the bureau's webpage.