UNCRC – Children’s Rights

There are four UK Children’s Commissioners based in Scotland Wales,  England and Northern Ireland. Their role is to promote and safeguard children’s rights. Every few years they come together to produce a joint report on the state of children’s rights in the UK. This report is then submitted to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child which monitors implementation of the UNCRC and the Committee subsequently issues its recommendations (Concluding Observations) to the UK Government. By way of a snapshot, the work of two of the Commissioners (Scotland and Wales) are highlighted below.

The Commissioner for Children and Young People in Scotland has produced a resource simplifying all the UNCRC articles and  making them accessible for younger children. This can be accessed here

The Children’s Commissioner for Wales has produced some helpful children’s rights resources for all years. Whilst the focus is on the Welsh education system. the ideas can easily be replicated. For example, useful resources for primary teachers can be accessed here

Together Scotland is an alliance of Scottish children’s charities that works to improve the awareness, understanding and implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). It does this by promoting the UNCRC, by helping children’s organisations to integrate the UNCRC into their work and by monitoring and reporting on progress made at a Scottish and UK level. Their website contains a lot of helpful information and can be accessed here

UNICEF is the children’s rights organisation of the United Nations. (UNICEF stands for United Nations Children’s Fund.) The organisation helps Governments to make laws that protect the rights of children. It also helps to set up new schools and nutrition programmes, and helps to provide clean water, good food and education.

The organisation also produces teaching materials – far too many to list here and interestingly the same lessons are equally applicable in different countries across the world. For example Know Your Rights is a pack of teaching materials to introduce key rights principles to students. The materials have been developed by UNICEF Netherlands and are ideal introducing children’s rights to students who are unfamiliar with the UNCRC.  The downloadable workbook and teachers pack contains a series of materials to help children learn about rights. The pack is aimed at children aged 11 to 12, but can be adapted for use with younger or older age groups. It can be accessed here

UNICEF UK

This page provides links to the UK Committee for UNICEF’s (UNICEF UK) Rights Respecting Schools Award. Teaching and learning about rights is an essential part of becoming a Rights Respecting school. UNICEF’s resources provide support for school staff to teach children and young people about children’s rights and global citizenship. Examples of materials created by schools and useful links to external resources about human rights and global citizenship can be found here

Amnesty International is the world’s largest (grassroots) human rights organisation which investigates and exposes abuses, educates the public and works to transform societies to create a safer and fairer world. Amnesty International UK also works to protect people wherever justice, freedom and dignity are denied. It is also does some important work in schools.

For example, the Learning about human rights in Primary School resource pack is an excellent resource: This contains ten interactive lesson activities to help pupils aged 5-11 understand their own human rights and the values and attitudes that underpin them. Subjects include global and fair trade, poverty and inequality, identity and children’s rights.

The idea behind the pack is to foster attitudes of respect and an appreciation of the uniqueness of each individual. Pupils will also develop skills to enable them to take action to defend human rights/ become human rights defenders.