Rights Respecting School
Rights Respecting School Council 2023/24
We congratulate all pupils on being elected by their class peers to serve as Right Respecting School Councillors for the incoming year.
Dundonald Primary School is proud to be a Gold "Rights Respecting School". This is the highest award given to schools by UNICEF,a leading organisation for children and their rights. This means that we have embedded children's rights in our school's practice and ethos. We put children's rights at the heart of our school. We work along side Unicef to create safe and inspiring places to learn, where children are respected, their talents are nurtured and they are able to thrive.
Our Rights Respecting School Award embeds these values in daily school life and gives children the best chance to lead happy, healthy lives and to be responsible, active citizens.
Each class,as you can see below, develops their own Class Charter which sets out the rights respecting actions expected for everybody in the class in order to protect the rights of the people in the class.We have developed playground, assembly, dining hall rights charters so that expectations are clear and consistent.
Our Rights Council is elected annually by the pupils in each class.The pulip voice is paramount at Dundonald Primary School reflecting every child's right to have their voice heard. We have a range of councils on which children serve and represent their class facilitating their voice.
Our Rights Respecting Council Members are a group of children from across the school who work to ensure that all members of our school community are made aware of the rights afforded to them through UNCRC. They also ensure that DPS respect the rights of others, making our school a happier, safer and more respectful place to learn and work.
A rights-respecting school not only teaches about children's rights, but also models rights and respect in all its relationships between adults and children, between children themselves, and between adults themselves.
The councils have sold reindeer food and american cookies as a means of fundraising to sponsor Cyrus living in Kenya to attend school through the charity Actions Not Words.
As part of our positive behaviour policy, at the beginning of each year our pupils work together with their teacher to decide upon their class charter. Have a look at a few examples of our chapters below ranging from Nursery to P7.
DPS and Nursery Class Charters
P1NI
P1KT- We chose Super heroes because we are all super in P1 and can do amazing things. We talked about rights and decided we have the right to play, learn and be safe. All children have responsibilities to follow to keep everyone safe and happy in school. We all agreed to try our best, walk in school, be kind and polite, listen carefully, take turns and share and look after our classroom.
P2JW-In P2JW we had a lovely discussion about 'Our Rights' the boys and girls understand that they have the right to learn, the right to play and rest and the right to be safe while they are in school. We talked through what this means and then decided to turn our Charter into a garden where beautiful flowers grow. As we grow and learn so much in P2. If you look closely at the colourful petals, you might just see a familiar face :)
P2MN- In P2MN we decided to make our Class Charter all about Hot Air Balloons. We talked about the importance of everyone having a right to education. We then talked about the different responsibilities that we have in P2. Have a look at the clouds and you will see notice some of the responsibilities we have in our class.
P3JB love getting dojo points as rewards so we based our charter around 'Planet Dojo'.
P3LS- We chose a bee theme for our class charter because we all work hard in P3LS and enjoy working together as a team, just like bees. At the start of the school year, we had a discussion on our rights and the rights of others and thought about the headings we wanted to include on our class charter in order to respect these rights. We came up with ‘Bee Safe’, ‘Bee Happy’ and ‘Bee Clever’. In small groups we discussed how we could achieve these targets in school. We thought of lots of wonderful ideas and agreed on the ones we wanted to put on our charter. These are written on the honeycomb beside each heading. We all got our own bee with our photograph on it and stuck it on the charter to show that we will all try our best and help each other to stay safe and happy in school.
P3CD’s class charter is a box of Crayola crayons. At the beginning of the year we discuss how we all are individually different (Article 14) because that’s what makes us, us. We then discuss how in our class we work together to help keep everyone safe and create a lovely classroom for learning and making friends, just like a box of crayons. We discuss how different rights (Article 3 and Article 28) allow us to develop a safe environment to learn, play and rest. We discuss what we and others can do to achieve this and allow us the become the best version of us that we can be.
P4DC
P5SM
P5TS
P5HC- The pupils provided many great ideas for our charter. A popular theme was Harry Potter, however some pupils haven't read Harry Potter and aren't familiar with it. So to include everyone we compromised and went for a Wizard theme! The pupils designed their own Wizard hat. In groups, the class ranked relevant articles and as a class we voted for the top 3 rights. These rights are the basis of our potion for a Rights Respecting Classroom, our class felt that Articles 15, 16 and 19 were the most important rights. We are very proud of our display and the pupils liked the play on words with 'Wanderful'!
P6JM
P6
P6ACS
P7
P7FE- P7 FE had an initial discussion about the UNCRC and then diamond ranked the top 9 rights most relevant to P7. Following this we chose 4 rights for our charter. The children and I discussed how we all could ensure these rights could operate in our class. The children decided to have an animal theme and brought in photographs either of their pets or favourite animal. These were put on the charter and the rights put on 'bones' and clouds in the sky.
P7JH- The children voted for this as it's something they enjoy doing. They also wanted to design their own characters.
