School Health and Nutrition Monitoring: What Practitioners and Policy Makers Can Learn from China.

“Coverage of School Health Monitoring Systems in China: a Large National Cross-Sectional Survey” by Yan et al. provides an important demonstration of the value of monitoring national school health and nutrition programs. School-based surveys have long been used as cost-efficient monitoring tools, as they serve as a proxy for the broader health and wellbeing for the community in which they live and inform programmatic responses. Despite their importance, there is surprisingly little published on how countries operationally monitor their programs, which presents meaningful challenges for program implementers globally.