Rights Respecting School

UNICEF is a global charity which protects and supports children. The Rights Respecting Schools Award (RRSA) recognises achievement in putting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) at the heart of a school’s planning, policies, practice and ethos.

A rights-respecting school not only teaches about children’s rights but also models rights and respect in all its relationships. This means that the whole school community will learn about rights, pupils will be involved in decisions about their school and the school community will have the knowledge to take action on standing up for the rights of children across the world.

Click here for further information on RRSA.

What is happening at Balerno HS?

Balerno High School is committed to the principles and values of the UNCRC which are embedded in the ethos and curriculum of our school. We aim to educate our young people within a Rights Respecting School and have recently received our Gold Award.

Look out for the following things happening around the school:

Updates and events from our junior and Senior RRSA group
Article of the Month for pupils, staff and parents.
Opportunities across the school that are making sure rights are being met: Pupil council, GSA, extra-curricular clubs, fundraising events.
Events linked to raising awareness of children’s rights across the world.
The UNCRC is being taken into account when making school policies. For example the Anti-bullying and Positive relationship policies.

How can you get involved?

Look out for our Article of the Month Sway for all pupils, staff and parents and take part in the activities.

These are sent out each month through email to all Parents and Carers. We also post links to our SWAY on the school twitter pages or please click on the pictures below to take you to the SWAY documents.

Articles in action across our school

As we continue our progress of teaching through, for and about children’s rights examples of good practice is now becoming evident across our school. Below you can find a sample of our new signage showing Rights in Action, feedback from teachers highlighting how they are supporting Children’s Rights and a snapshot from our twitter page that is continually sharing what we are doing as a school.

Every faculty meeting we ask our colleagues to complete some challenge questions related to the articles we are focussing on that month. These responses are collated and shared to help the school learn from each other and expand the impact across the school. Here is a sample of the feedback so far.

Exciting News

Earlier this year, the UNICEF Rights Respecting Schools Award (RRSA) team took part in the accreditation process aiming to achieve our Gold award. As part of this accreditation, the team of assessors met with a group of pupils, staff and the Headteacher to ascertain the progress we have made. They fed back that they were really impressed with the work we have done as a school and thought the pupils were amazing.

I am very proud to announce that we have now achieved our Gold award!

Please find the evidence SWAY below, where you can see all the hard work our RRSA team have done to achieve this.

This would not have been possible without the hard work of our pupil teams and the school community, so thank you for the continued support.