How UNICEF’s Rights Respecting Schools Award is helping a special school in London promote positive relationships by emphasising rights and responsibilities.
As an employee of UNICEF, I was aware of the positive effects of UNICEF UK’s Rights Respecting Schools Award (RRSA) on schools around the UK. And, thanks to research recently published by the Universities of Sussex and Brighton, I had the stats to prove it. But it wasn’t until I visited a rights respecting special secondary school in London that I saw how truly transformative the award can be.
I was shown around the school by three pupils, Jordan, Nasro and Rohat. They showed me articles from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) – which RRSA incorporates as part of the school’s ethos – on many classroom walls. The three took great pride in telling me about countries around the world they’d been learning about and pointing out class charters, which match pupil’s rights with responsibilities.
“I'm on the School Council,” Rohat told me. “We have a class charter and we learn about rights and responsibilities. We don't swear or be silly in class.”
Their pride was more than matched by the teachers’ enthusiasm for the award. “It’s really at the core of everything that we do,” says Liza. “We use the (RRSA) language throughout the day, in the school as well as in the playground.”
Emily, the Head of School, went further: “If schools understand it in the way that we’ve done, it has got the potential hopefully to change society in the future.”
Teaching through rights in more challenging environments
By putting rights and responsibilities at the heart of a school’s culture, RRSA has helped schools around the UK improve behaviour and teacher-pupil relationships, raised attainment and reduced exclusions and bullying – according to the three year qualitative study previously mentioned.
It’s no surprise, then, that over 2,000 primary and secondary schools have signed up. But the initiative is aimed at all areas of formal education, including more challenging teaching environments such as pupil referral units and special needs schools like the one I visited, which has adapted RRSA for a special needs environment. This means that the pupils are taught more through rights than about rights.
“If there are issues about sharing equipment,” explains Liza, “we’ll say ‘you have the right to use the equipment, but you have the responsibility to share it’.”
“We give pupils a structure that they work within but they do it themselves and we as adults facilitate it,” says Peggy, the Headteacher. “We don’t jump in and do it for them, and that’s respecting them. And that has a knock-on effect with the adults that work here because we value each other as individuals.”
In June 2011 the school became a Level 2 Rights Respecting Special School, which means it has fully embedded the values and principles of the CRC into its ethos and curriculum. An example of this is the school’s ‘visions and values’, including a specially adapted version for pupils. Both versions have incorporated rights and responsibilities.
“We now live by those values and the UNICEF badge sits right at the top of it,” says Peggy.
Hail Caesar!
After my tour, I’m invited along to the pupil’s Christmas play, a specially adapted version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, followed by Christmas carols and songs.
As the pupils performing have autistic spectrum disorders and social communication difficulties, I am really not sure what to expect. But I shouldn’t have doubted the pupils. I am bowled over by the drama, the music accompaniment from the pupils, the audience interaction, and above all, the performances of the pupils on stage.
“The children are up there doing what they can do and they outperform themselves and we probably didn’t give them the respect to do that before,” says Peggy. “They might make mistakes. They’re up on the stage, there’s no staff there, but because we’re calm about it, we let them do it – they fulfil it. And that’s giving them responsibilities. That says it all really.”
Find out more:
The author
Hugh Reilly is web editor at UNICEF UK.