QCAA Health General Senior Syllabus 2025 v1.3 (from 2026)
The external assessment is a single written examination rather than a set of numbered papers. Students receive a stimulus book of unseen source material alongside a question and response book, and produce an extended response that analyses those sources and argues for a health-promoting action strategy. It contributes 25% of the final subject result, and marking guides are published with the papers. Marks come from working visibly through the health inquiry model: interpreting the sources, reframing the issue, planning action and justifying it.
Past papers on this subject span more than one syllabus. Papers written under an older one still work as practice, but the units and topics they test have changed — the index labels every paper with the syllabus it was set under.
2019 v1.2 General senior syllabus · 2020–20252025 v1.3 General senior syllabus · 2026–current
The units and topics, one by one
Each area below lists the concepts named in the syllabus, what the QCAA exam asks of them, and the mistake that most often costs marks.
Area 1 of 5
Unit 1: Resilience as a personal health resource
Unit 1 reframes health from the absence of disease to a dynamic, holistic and personal resource for everyday living. The salutogenic or strengths-based approach is the anchor: instead of asking what makes people sick, you ask what keeps them well and which assets they can draw on. You learn the personal, social, economic and environmental determinants of health and the AIHW conceptual framework that organises them, showing how upstream determinants such as income, education and housing shape downstream behaviours and health outcomes. Resilience is then studied as something that can be built and strengthened — protective factors, coping resources, supportive relationships and a sense of coherence — rather than a fixed personality trait. This unit supplies the vocabulary the rest of the course runs on, so loose use of a word like 'determinant' here costs marks later.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 5 points
- Salutogenic (strengths-based) approach to health
- Personal, social, economic and environmental determinants of health
- AIHW conceptual framework for determinants of health
- Health as a dynamic, holistic and personal resource
- Building and strengthening personal resilience
What the exam asks
Unit 1 is not examined directly, but its concepts underpin every exam response. You are expected to use determinants precisely, apply the salutogenic lens when explaining why one group's health differs from another's, and treat health as a resource that can be strengthened. Definitions alone earn little; the marks sit in applying the framework to the stimulus.
Where marks go missing
Sliding back into a deficit view — listing risk factors and problems for the target group when the question asks what protects or strengthens them. The salutogenic framing has to shape how the issue is described, not appear once as a named term.
Area 2 of 5
Unit 2: Peers and family as resources for healthy living
This unit narrows the focus to the two settings that shape adolescent health most directly: peers and family. You examine how norms, modelling, support and pressure inside those settings influence health behaviour, working through an elective topic — alcohol and body image are the syllabus examples. The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion is introduced here as the tool for turning analysis into action, with its action areas (building healthy public policy, creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, developing personal skills and reorienting health services) used to design health-promoting action at the peer and family level. The point is not to memorise the charter but to judge which action areas genuinely fit a peer or family setting, and why an approach that works inside a school may fail inside a household.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 5 points
- Role and influence of peers and family on health behaviours
- Elective topic: Alcohol
- Elective topic: Body image
- Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion
- Health-promoting actions at the peer/family level
What the exam asks
Exam questions built on peer or family stimulus expect you to identify the influence at work, connect it to determinants, and select an Ottawa Charter action area suited to that setting. Justification carries the marks: explaining why the chosen action can reach this group, and naming what would cause it to fail.
Where marks go missing
Listing all five Ottawa Charter action areas instead of choosing. A response that hedges across every action area demonstrates no judgement; markers reward selecting one or two, matching them to the setting in the stimulus and defending the choice.
Area 3 of 5
Unit 3: Community as a resource for healthy living
Unit 3 scales the analysis up to a community. You study an elective topic — homelessness, transport safety or anxiety — and use the social ecological model to see how individual, relationship, community and societal levels interact to produce the issue, with determinants operating at each level. Two skills matter most here. Context analysis and needs assessment require you to work from real data about a specific place and population, establishing what that group actually needs rather than what an outsider assumes. The diffusion of innovations model then explains how a new idea, product or behaviour spreads through a group: innovators and early adopters, the attributes that make an innovation adoptable, and the communication channels that carry it. Together they let you argue that a proposed action will actually take hold.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 6 points
- Elective topic: Homelessness
- Elective topic: Transport safety
- Elective topic: Anxiety
- Social ecological model and determinants in a community context
- Context analysis and needs assessment
- Diffusion of innovations model applied to a target group/setting
What the exam asks
Stimulus about a community — data tables, media extracts, program descriptions — is the standard exam form. You analyse the sources to establish context and need, then apply the social ecological or diffusion model to propose and defend an action. Marks depend on citing the specific sources rather than generalising about communities.
Where marks go missing
Proposing an action that ignores the diffusion evidence — a strategy pitched at the whole population instead of the innovators and early adopters who would realistically take it up first in the community the stimulus describes.
Area 4 of 5
Unit 4: Respectful relationships in the post-schooling transition
Unit 4 applies everything to a life course transition you are about to make: the move out of school into work, further study, a gap year or independent living. Respectful relationships are studied as a health resource inside those new contexts, and you examine innovations — programs, campaigns, technologies and policies — that influence them. The three diffusion action strategies of mediate, enable and advocate structure how you intervene: mediating between competing interests, enabling people with skills and resources, and advocating for change in the conditions around them. The unit finishes where the exam finishes, evaluating and reflecting on whether an action strategy worked and synthesising evidence into a reasoned strategy you can defend. Evaluation here means judging against criteria and evidence, not narrating what happened.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 5 points
- Innovations that influence respectful relationships
- Life course transition to post-schooling contexts (work, further study, gap year)
- Diffusion action strategies: mediate, enable, advocate
- Evaluating and reflecting on health-promoting action strategies
- Synthesising evidence into a reasoned action strategy
What the exam asks
This is the unit the extended response leans on most. You will be asked to synthesise unseen sources into a reasoned action strategy for a specified transition context and to evaluate its likely effectiveness. Explicit use of mediate, enable and advocate, tied to evidence in the stimulus, separates a strong response from a plausible one.
Where marks go missing
Ending the response at the proposal. Without evaluation — what could go wrong, what evidence supports the choice, how success would be judged — the answer stops short of the cognitions the criteria reward, however sensible the strategy sounds.
Area 5 of 5
Health inquiry model (cross-unit skills)
The health inquiry model is the process the whole subject runs on, and the examination is essentially one pass through it under time pressure. Its stages are defining and understanding a health topic or issue; reframing that topic into a contextualised issue for a specific group and setting; planning for action; and implementing, evaluating and reflecting on the action strategy. Reframing is the step students undervalue: turning a broad topic such as anxiety into a defined issue for a named group in a named context is what makes everything after it arguable. The model also carries the external assessment skill of analysing and interpreting unseen stimulus material — reading data, media and program sources quickly, judging what they show and what they leave out, and selecting the ones that will carry your argument.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 5 points
- Defining and understanding a health topic/issue
- Reframing a topic into a contextualised issue
- Planning for action
- Implementing, evaluating and reflecting on action strategies
- Analysing and interpreting unseen stimulus/source material (EA skill)
What the exam asks
The examination asks you to run the model live: interpret unseen sources, reframe the topic into a contextualised issue, plan action and evaluate it. Responses are marked on the quality of that reasoning chain, so each stage must be visible and each claim must be traceable to something in the stimulus book.
Where marks go missing
Writing about the topic in general instead of the contextualised issue. Once a response drifts back to anxiety or homelessness 'in Australia' rather than the specific group, setting and need drawn from the stimulus, every later stage loses its grounding.
Common questions
Is QCE Health the same subject as Physical Education?
No. Health is a social science with no practical performance component: you analyse determinants of health, health promotion frameworks such as the Ottawa Charter, and evidence about specific groups and settings. Physical Education studies biophysical and sociocultural concepts through your own performance in selected physical activities. They are separate subjects with separate syllabuses and separate examinations.
What does the QCE Health external exam actually look like?
It is a single written examination built on unseen stimulus material. You receive a stimulus book alongside the question and response book and write an extended response that analyses those sources and argues a health-promoting action strategy. It contributes 25% of your subject result, and past papers with marking guides are published for most recent years.
Which units are examined in QCE Health?
External assessment covers Units 3 and 4 — community as a resource for healthy living, and respectful relationships in the post-schooling transition. Units 1 and 2 are assessed internally, but the salutogenic approach, the determinants of health and the Ottawa Charter introduced there are used constantly inside Unit 3 and 4 responses.
Has the QCAA Health syllabus changed?
Yes. The 2019 v1.2 syllabus applied to cohorts examined from 2020 to 2025, and the 2025 v1.3 syllabus applies to students completing the course from 2026. The four-unit structure and the core frameworks carry over, with revisions to the objectives, health inquiry model, subject matter and assessment specifications, so check current specifications when practising with older papers.