What is a Rights Respecting School?
A Rights Respecting School (RRS) works with its students to learn about children’s rights and incorporate them into daily life. The goal is to ensure students are healthy and happy, feel safe, have positive relationships, and are involved in school life and their wider community.
As the recipient of a Silver Award, UNICEF has deemed us a Rights Aware school. This means we’ve promoted knowledge and understanding of the UNCRC by embedding its principles into our School ethos and curriculum.
Staff and students have put in a commendable amount of work to get to this stage, and the Silver Award is a fantastic reflection of that, but as Mrs Jill Roxburgh, whose in charge of the Junior School’s RRS initiative, says there is still more to accomplish.
“What has made our journey so special is how powerfully our students have embraced children’s rights. They can explain their rights, see them in action, and increasingly use them to shape our school for the better,” she says. “We are excited to continue empowering students to use their rights to influence change, campaign for fairness, and take action locally and globally as we work towards Gold.”
How did we achieve this award?
Thanks to the tireless efforts of several staff members, including Mrs Roxburgh, Mr Archie Millar, and Ms Fiona Levitt, the School created an action plan that embedded children’s rights at its heart, resulting in a respectful, inclusive, and rights-based environment. This action plan covers the Junior School as it moves to a single site at our Ravelston campus, as well as the Senior School as it becomes one fully co-educational school on Queensferry Road.
Here are some of the events and initiatives that led to us receiving the Silver Award:
“We are excited to continue empowering students to use their rights to influence change, campaign for fairness, and take action locally and globally as we work towards Gold.”
Day-to-day initiatives
These initiatives were designed to familiarise students with children’s rights, making them a part of their everyday lives. This includes corridors with posters displaying different rights, a Junior School Design-a-Mascot competition in which the mascot was inspired by children’s rights, a Junior School Rights Respecting Advent Calendar leading into the winter holidays that featured a different right each day, a “12 Rights of Christmas” song that was written and performed by staff and students, and videos and quizzes created by our Senior students to explore children’s rights.
School-wide events
The second RRS Conference took place last November, giving students from P6 to S6 the opportunity to discuss, explore, and voice their opinions to staff about children’s rights across the School community.
During this conference, students created our “Positive Relationships and Good Behaviour Policy,” which set out guidelines about how to cultivate positive teacher-student relationships.
Staff also asked students to complete an online questionnaire that asked which children’s right they found most important and why. 526 Senior students took part. There were a variety of answers, but the ones that cropped up most often were the right to health, clean water, food, and a safe environment; the right to an adequate standard of living; the right to play, rest, and participate in cultural life; and the right to education.
Our Junior School Rights Respecting Champions and a RRS Senior School Steering Group continue to ensure that our action is informed by student voice. These groups of students actively shape school practice and help drive our action plan forward through staff consultations and awareness-raising activities.
Wellbeing Initiatives
A large part of our RRS plan is focussed on students’ wellbeing, specifically the need to make them feel safe and heard at school. To accomplish this, staff created Peer Meditation and Listening Lunches. This offers Junior School students the daily opportunity to speak with trained student peer mediators.
For Senior School students, we operate an open-door policy where students are encouraged to talk to their Guidance Leaders, Class Teachers, dedicated Wellbeing Support Assistants, Teachers’ Assistants, or any other member of staff.
“We remain committed to continuing to improve as we work towards achieving Gold accreditation.”
We also encourage peer support where older students provide guidance, reassurance, and positive role modelling to younger students. This has helped build strong cross-stage relationships and a sense of belonging in the School.
Finally, we introduced Mental Health Ambassadors in the Senior School. These are students who actively champion wellbeing, help reduce stigma, and provide support to other students. This has paired well with our Place2Be partnership, which we introduced last year. Place2Be is the leading mental health charity for children and young people. It provides vital emotional and mental health support to our students through expert one-to-one counselling services.
Thanks to all these fantastic initiatives, Ms Levitt, who’s the overall lead on the project, continues to see positive advances within the School community.
“Our students demonstrate a deep understanding of children’s rights and speak confidently about how embedding these has positively transformed our school and how they see themselves as global citizens,” she says. “Staff are seeing the impact, too, with a shared language and ethos supporting learning, wellbeing, and respect. We remain committed to continuing to improve as we work towards achieving Gold accreditation.”
