The pupils at the Elizabeth College Junior School have been taught throughout the year what rights they have and their Unicef Rights Respecting programme achievement recognises the work put in by the school and the students in putting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into practice.
An assembly, led by the school council, saw parents and teachers applaud the children on sharing their views on the importance of the award.
The council’s chairman, Albert Wheadon, 11, said they had enjoyed learning more about their rights.
‘Before taking part in this programme I didn’t know what they were,’ he said.
‘I had not known that we had them, but we’ve learnt a lot and we can now use that knowledge to gain a better education.’
The aim of the bronze award is to arm students with strategies to involve and inform all members of the school community, learning about a number of rights, including the right to education, the right to privacy, and the right to an adequate standard of living.
Caspar Roughsedge, 11, said they were now going to introduce a suggestion box to aid the students in remembering their rights.
‘In school we have many rights and we have been putting them into practice,’ he said.
‘We have the right to be safe and not experience neglect and these are important for us to learn.’
The junior school’s deputy head pastoral, Liz Bott, said most people in the UK had very little knowledge of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
‘Many children don’t know what their rights are,’ she said.
‘However, Guernsey as an island, has been keen to adopt the UN Convention which emphasises the need to ensure all children have access to safe, inspiring environments in which to learn and thrive.
‘The school council is helping to lead the school community to discover how this programme relates to and supports our school’s own aims of ‘aim high, be kind, be brave’.
‘It’s an important project and one that the children have been really involved in – there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when we presented it to carers and parents in the assembly this morning.’
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