Some schools in Bristol are introducing, to children, and parents the United Nations Convention and the 54 articles on the Rights of the Child. UNICEF’s guiding document is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2009. It was ratified by the UK government in 1991.
I.R.I.S have been retained to support the delivery of UNICEF’s Right’s Respecting Award across Bristol. I.R.I.S staff have the expertise and organisational structure to support young people to disseminate the ethos beyond the school to the wider community and we are currently seeking funding to deliver this on behalf of children who would like to articipate in improving their communities.
Schools participating in the RRSA (1) have used the values of the UNCRC to underpin their ethos and curriculum. They have seen a significant, positive impact on important aspects of child well-being (2) and school improvement. Embedding the rights of every child into the school ethos has a visible positive effect on the relationships, teaching approaches, attitudes and behaviour of everyone involved.
Why is UNICEF UK doing work in the UK?
In 2007, UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre published the report Child
Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries. The report for the first time measured and compared overall child well-being across six dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people’s subjective sense of their own well-being.
Out of the 21 industrialised countries assessed in the report, the UK ranked in the bottom third of the country rankings for five of the six dimensions reviewed. While the country ranked higher in the educational well-being dimension, the UK lags behind in terms of relative poverty and deprivation,quality of children’s relationships with their parents and peers, child health and safety, behaviour and risk-taking and subjective well-being. The UK
ranked worst over all when the indicators were aggregated together.
www.unicef.org.uk/rrsa
www.babyfriendly.org.uk
www.childfriendlycities.org
