UNICEF Rights Respecting Schools Award
What is the RRSA?
The UNICEF Rights Respecting Schools Award aims to promote the rights of children within schools throughout the UK, to ensure all children feel safe, have opportunities to thrive and grow, and give children every possible chance to lead happy, healthy lives and become active citizens in the world.
A Rights Respecting School not only teaches about children’s rights, but embeds these rights into everything it does: the relationships between staff, students and the wider community, as well as the curriculum, the opportunities provided for students and the pastoral care that students receive.
At Harris Academy Sutton, we want our students to feel they have a voice, to respect and celebrate the differences that make each of us unique, and to gain the skills and knowledge they need to go out into the world and engage in all aspects of life, whether that be further education and careers, relationships and families, or even participating in politics.
RRSA at HASU
We have achieved our Bronze Award, which means we are committed to promoting the rights of our students, and are working towards embedding them into every aspect of life at HASU.
We do this by:
- Explicitly teaching about rights in the Citizenship strand of our Personal Development Curriculum, with each year group spending six weeks exploring topics related to the rights of children
- Including discussions of rights and themes related to them in our assemblies and IID day programme
- Offering a wide range of enrichment options to all our students, ensuring they have varied opportunities to gain new experiences and develop their talents
- Giving students a voice through our various student leadership opportunities, such as Prefects and Commissioners
- Celebrating equality, diversity and inclusion in the academy through the work of our Stonewall and Diversity Ambassadors
- Teaching our students a broad and balanced curriculum in all our subjects, which allows our students to gain knowledge and skills they will use in later life
Working towards the Silver Award
We aim to have achieved our Silver Award by the end of the 2022-23 academic year. In order to achieve this we have our RRSA Student Action Group. This is a group of students who meet each week to discuss what rights are, how they can be protected and how the Academy is teaching and learning about rights, through rights and for our rights. They do this by:
- Auditing the school curriculum to see where students are learning about the rights of children in each subject area
- Surveying the students and staff of the Academy to ascertain how well rights are understood, and which areas we need to improve on
- Developing and implementing ways to further promote the rights of children in every part of Academy life
- Working with staff to ensure rights are at the heart of all we do at HASU.
We hope to be celebrating our Silver Award very soon!
