Human rights in schools

Teaching Citizenship through Human Rights - FREE teacher training events

To celebrate the launch of the Human Rights in Schools Project resources, we are holding a series of FREE teacher training events during June 2008 for those involved in delivering Citizenship education at Key Stage 3.

The one-day training events will:

introduce participants to human rights, focusing on two key human rights frameworks; the Human Rights Act and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
enable participants to feel confident in delivering lessons about human rights
introduce participants to a human rights approach to teaching and learning which will support their teaching of Citizenship as a whole
explore practical tips and strategies for delivering Citizenship through human rights education, using activities and ideas from the new KS3 human rights resource pack, and other relevant resources.

Download the draft prgramme.

Who should attend?

Teachers of KS3 Citizenship
Citizenship Co-ordinators
Citizenship advisers and other people who support the delivery of citizenship

Dates and Venues:

3 June Bristol
6 June London
10 June Coventry
17 June Newcastle
19 June Leeds

To book, please print off and complete a Training Booking Form which can be found here, and return it by post or fax.

For more information on the training please contact Helen Trivers, our Education Officer, on htrivers@bihr.org.uk or 0207 848 1926.

About the Human Rights in Schools project

BIHR is currently working on the Human Rights in Schools project in partnership with the Ministry of Justice, Amnesty International UK, and the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

The overall aims of the project are to:

Increase awareness of human rights among pupils, and enable them to understand how human rights impact on their day-to-day lives at school and in their community;
Strengthen teachers’ skills to teach about human rights and demonstrate a rights based approach in their work; and
Support schools to develop and apply a whole school human rights based approach.

Project Update

We are in the final stages of completing both a teaching resource pack for KS3 citizenship lessons, and a set of whole school guidelines to support schools to implement a whole-school human rights approach.

The KS3 Teaching Resource has been developed for use within Citizenship lessons, and has been carefully designed to ensure that it links with the new Key Stage 3 Citizenship curriculum to be taught from September 2008. It contains a series of lesson plans, complete with comprehensive teachers’ notes and resources.

Topics include:

The Human Rights Story
Human Rights in the UK
Balancing Rights
Human Rights issues: Identities and diversity
Taking Action for Human Rights

The Whole School Guidelines recognise that while it is important to learn about human rights in the classroom, understanding human rights principles is best achieved by experiencing them in action. The guidelines will support schools to develop their own ‘human rights based approaches’ (HRBAs) to help them make dignity, equality, respect, fairness and autonomy a routine part of the experiences of every member of staff and pupil.

Opportunities for teachers

As stated above, the new resources will be accompanied by a series of free regional teacher training events will take place in June 2008.

For more information on any of the resources or training please contact Helen Trivers, our Education Officer, on htrivers@bihr.org.uk or 0207 848 1926.

Helen Trivers in Teaching Citizenship

BIHR’s Education Officer, Helen Trivers, discusses BIHR’s exciting new Human Rights in Schools project in the Spring 2008 edition of Teaching Citizenship. Click here to read the resource (PDF: 13.5mb).

Other projects

Human Rights Day 2007 Schools Pack

Human Rights Day was celebrated annually across the world on 10th December. The date was chosen to commemorate the United Nations General Assembly's adoption and proclamation, on 10 December 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the first global human rights document.

As part of our Human Rights in Schools project, BIHR worked with two teachers from the Teach First programme to produce a schools pack to support secondary schools to celebrate Human Rights Day, offering a taster of some of the activities in the forthcoming KS3 Citizenship resource. The Human Rights Day pack contains a range of activities, from whole-school assemblies to lesson plans which are suitable for use in secondary schools.

If you would like to receive a copy of the pack, please contact BIHR on education@bihr.org.uk or 0207 848 1926.

BIHR would like to thank Ruth Owen and Sequoia Taylor, both members of the Teach First programme, for working on this pack as part of their internships with BIHR this year.

Anti Bullying Week Activities

This year, BIHR, along with the Welsh Assembly Government and Stonewall Cymru, partnered with the Croeso Project to produce an education resource in order to help schools in Wales mark this year’s Anti-Bullying Week and celebrate the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All . Anti-bullying Week is held in November every year as an opportunity for schools and youth groups to get involved in tackling bullying. The resource suggests ideas for a relevant assembly, classroom activities and also signposts information for teachers. The resource was sent out to every primary and secondary school in Wales at the beginning of November so that relevant activities could be planned throughout the week. To see a copy of the resource click here.

Further information

If you would like more information about BIHR ’s education work or to find out how you can get involved, please contact our Education Officer, Helen Trivers at htrivers@bihr.org.uk or on 0207 848 1926.