Human Rights Commission

8 May 2007

Advocate urges NZ to adopt human rights based education

A British human rights approach in class rooms has reduced discipline problems and boosted academic results.

John Clarke, the deputy director of Children's Services in Hampshire, UK and an advocate for the Rights, Respect, Responsibility education project said the concept was spreading around the United Kingdom and the world.

"Children are the living message we send to a future we'll never see. It's our responsibility to determine what that message is and it seems to me that a rights-respecting one is about the best place to start," he said at the launch of Building Human Rights Communities in Education, a publication that sets out ways to introduce such a programme to New Zealand in the Grand Hall of Parliament this evening.

Hampshire began the Rights, Respect, Responsibility programme in 2003, taking ideas from a similar programme in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Children are taught about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and it becomes the framework for the way children and adults operate in the school.

"It's a new way of thinking and it's designed to develop effective citizens who make a positive contribution to their community," said Clarke.

Clarke said children's language became more sophisticated, attendance improved and children find less confrontational ways to sort their conflicts.

In an increasingly diverse society Clarke said the RRR programme was an effective solution to the "moral relativism" that had afflicted English schools for years. "It provides an authority outside the school to which children and adults can appeal," he said. Every country except for two has signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Clarke said the universality of human rights ensured that it was an effective way of mediating the tensions that can arise with multiculturalism.

Clarke was brought to New Zealand by a range of organisations including the Human Rights Commission to speak to policy makers about the Hampshire programme. He is speaking with the Ministry of Education and the Education Select Committee during his visit which has coincided with the launch of Building Human Rights Communities in Education, a study of the state of human rights based education in New Zealand.

For the publication, go to the Commission's website: www.hrc.co.nz

ENDS