Abstract:

The last Law of Education (LOE) of May 3th, 2006, incorporates the basic competences into the school curriculum as one of the elements that compose it and gives them the main role of the curriculum to carry out an overall assessment of diagnosis.
The Spanish government assumes this legislative decision, the conclusions of the international organizations (OECD and European Commission) and the Program for International Student Assessment's (PISA) about teaching and learning basic competences as a way to improve quality and equity of educational system. The incorporation of basic competences of the curriculum is an early commitment to bring the Spanish education system to international standards.
The citizens, on their way through compulsory education receive and learn knowledge about mathematics, language, science, etc. that allow them to integrate on the society, but.. do they need to develop necessary competences to function in a changing society, to control the factors that determine their health, individual and collective, to intervene in their immediate environment to make it more humane and nicer, definitively, to live better and longer?
We understand the competences as the capacity of solving problems or facing situations, with the attitude of wishing to do it, in a particular context. So, the competences have components to know and understand (knowledge), components to know how to act (skills) and, finally, components to know how to be (attitudes and behaviours). All this aspects are integrated taking part of the competence.
Health competences mean the ability and determination to solve problems related to personal and collective health of young people. The problems we are referring to, are those that require or may require an action by a health educator, problems that not require the direct intervention of medical professionals.
The fields of health are situations, contexts and environments where we can find a set of health problems linked between them and we can act on them as a whole. The fields of health, which we are referring to, are those related to Nutritional and Physical Activity, Addictions, Mental and Emotional Health, Sexuality, Accidents, Hygiene, Environment and Health Promotion.
It is requires to concrete standards that allow to evaluate the achievement of the competence in each of the fields. To do it, it has been define the main health problems for each field, and it has been selected the items to evaluate curriculum, textbooks and students competences in compulsory education.

Keywords:

Health promotion, skills, education.