If someone said the words “respecting children’s rights”, what would you say in return?
“Not another new-fangled initiative”? “Why do we want to fill children’s minds with rights – aren’t there enough people talking about their rights already”?
If this would be your natural, sceptical reaction, I would well understand – because this was exactly the sort of thought going through my mind when I went last week to Bridport Primary School to hear about the fact that it had won an award for being a “respecting rights” school.
What’s more, if you talk to some of the teachers who were at the school five years ago when this idea was first introduced there, you would find that they shared the same scepticism at that stage. They had little enthusiasm for the idea of turning their children into barrack-room lawyers.
But those same teachers today have become enthusiasts – and, now that I have seen the thing in action, I have, too. The key difference between what is going on in Bridport Primary School and what you might think would happen, is that the “respecting rights” idea has been translated into something that makes the children very conscious of the rights of other children – and hence of their own responsibilities.
I am told that the value of this approach really became clear when the caretaker noticed, after about two years of operating the scheme, that he had not had to make any repairs in the playground.
Pupils at the school also talk enthusiastically about the way in which some of the older ones have been trained up to act as mediators, solving disputes between the younger children. And it is positively touching to hear both pupils and teachers describing how what you might think would be useless paraphernalia – the charters in every classroom and the displays reminding people about rights and responsibilities – have actually helped to make the place feel safer and nicer.
What the school has managed to create is an extraordinary sense of good citizenship. It comes out in all sorts of ways – not least when one teacher told me that she had just seen a young pupil, who was rather aggressively pulling a toy tractor around, being asked very politely by another pupil to stop doing this because it was likely to damage their nice building. The neighbourly society in action – and at the age of 10!
What makes this so interesting is that the power of an idea has been used to alter the balance of power. The majority of pupils — sensible and nice children who want to learn in pleasant and safe surroundings — have been given a language in which to exert communal pressure on anybody who is, or is thinking of being, a trouble-maker.
So far from creating a generation of barrack-room lawyers, the school’s focus on rights and responsibilities has actually created a culture within which kindness and good sense triumph day-by-day over the untoward and the unruly. Society as a whole has a lot to learn from Bridport Primary School.