Pupils from a school in Dorset perform songs about children's right.
Photo: Dorset County Council.
Hundreds of young people sang their own songs about children’s rights at a special concert in Dorset last week, organised to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) last November.
The CRC spells out children’s rights and aims to ensure that young people have the best possible start in life. Pupils from schools across the county gathered at St Osmund’s Middle School, Dorchester, to perform songs written especially for its birthday – but also to commemorate a new start for children’s rights in the area.
Dorset has been working closely with UNICEF UK’s Rights Respecting School initiative, which gives young people more of a say in how their school is run by underlining the importance of the CRC.
The success of this has led Dorset County Council to look at ways of making child’s rights an integral part of all of its services for young people. This will help ensure that children are valued as citizens and that decisions are taken with children's best interests in mind.
"The Rights Respecting Schools Award has been very successful in Dorset,” said David Powell, Dorset County Council's principal primary inspector and UNICEF partner. “Schools that become rights respecting find that behaviour, attitude to learning and respect for others improves.”
Powell underlined his support for UNICEF UK’s work by writing a song about rights which was also performed at the concert, called The Promise (see the video above).
Dorset County Council's cabinet member for children's services Toni Coombs said: "Having seen the positive effect that the rights respecting ethos has in our schools, I'm delighted that we are now taking this into local communities across Dorset.”
She added: "I was blown away by the array of young talent we have in Dorset. It was lovely to see and hear pupils perform songs with very powerful messages about human rights.”
This month saw UNICEF UK launch Put it Right, a major, five-year initiative to inspire action to protect the rights of children everywhere - the right to a childhood, to be healthy, to be educated, to be treated fairly and to be heard. Millions of children around the world are denied these rights. This is wrong and UNICEF is working to put it right.
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