Celebrating Human Rights Day
It’s Human Rights Day – and to celebrate, we’re sharing a special video with children’s rights at its heart.
This year we launched Our Plan, which sets out what we will be working on over the next four years.
To make the plan, we listened to children and young people from all over Scotland, all with different experiences, in lots of different ways. We wanted to find out what was important to them, and what issues they thought we should focus on.
It was important that we created many options for children to explore their experience of rights with us. One of the ways we did this was by working in partnership with creative practitioners.
One partnership was with musicians from the band Sprog Rock, who have expertise in working with early years children and their families. We’ve created a film following Sprog Rock musicians, Geraldine and Ronan, working alongside us with children in St Aidan’s Primary and Calderbridge Primary in North Lanarkshire. As part of this engagement, the children explored their rights and what mattered to them by creating a song. Over several sessions, the children, Sprog Rock, and Commissioner Nicola teamed up and the result was a lively song about rights directly from the children’s thoughts and experiences.
The theme of this year’s Human Rights Day is “Our rights, our future, right now” and in the video, you’ll see children coming together to work out the melody, rhythm and lyrics to the song. They tell us what they care about in their own words, expressing connection to a range of rights, including their rights to play, to an adequate standard of living, to good health and to be cared for.
The ‘boss’ in the song signifies that they are rights-holders, right now, with their own agency. It nods to the fact that the Children’s Commissioner works for all children and young people. They are the bosses!
Commissioner Nicola says: “I was very excited to be able to collaborate with Sprog Rock, working with younger children. It’s so important for me to be able to listen to all children, as many as possible, but from all different ages, ranges, and abilities.
“[The song is a] combination of playfulness, creativity, and deep, deep listening and recognition that children are wise, children have so much to say, and that we are really listening.”
One boy told us: “You have a right to learn.”
Another added: “You have a right to play and a right to eat.”
Wendy Todd, teacher from Calderbridge Primary said: “The children became totally immersed in the sessions and it was great to see them leading the learning throughout and being given a platform to express their views and be heard. Finding ways to promote and embed rights throughout the curriculum is always a big challenge in schools, and particularly for infant teachers trying to ensure they are exploring rights at a level that can be understood and appreciated.
“The relaxed and entertaining sessions have helped us reflect on our approaches to teaching and learning through rights and how we might adapt our planning to provide our children with a more holistic experience that helps to embed rights by simply exploring their thoughts, ideas and perceptions of the world.”
Watch the video and listen to the children’s song.