On Wednesday 6th March two Year 10 students and Unicef Peer Educators Abbey Pearson and Cheryl Bartholomew accompanied teacher Mrs Hilary Delany to Unicef House London for a secondary network conference on the Rights of the Child. The aim of the day was for schools across the south east to share good practice, and for some beacon schools who are level one and two to share aspects of their own journey. Harrow Way Community School was one of the Level 2 beacon schools that had been chosen by Unicef to showcase their journey in achieving and embedding the Rights Respecting School Award at Level 2.
There were many other schools present from boroughs and counties across the south east such as: Peterborough, Thurrock, Bexley, Portsmouth, Essex, West Sussex, Medway, Camden, Bracknell and Wandsworth. These schools were at various stages of their RRR journey and some were at the very beginning of this journey.
Abbey and Cheryl gave a very competent presentation that lasted 15 minutes about embedding the Rights of the Child as a Level 2 school. This was followed by a question and answer session from other delegates, teachers and students. The students received certificates from Unicef in recognition of their work that day.
Click here to read Abbey Pearson’s own account of the day.
Part of their presentation included an assembly that had been put together in school by another group of Unicef Peer Educators Abbie Haswell, Nayana McGee and Ellie Hamblen based around the Right to Education. Unicef has since requested a copy of this film which they found so professional and moving they would like to make use of it in the future and share it with other schools. This was the first conference of its kind run by Unicef UK and was a great success.
Harrow Way intends to continue this valuable work and our next challenge is to raise awareness in and out of school of the upcoming ‘IF’ campaign which is about tackling global hunger. We also intend to enter a nationwide ‘Shape the future’ competition which offers students the opportunity to help shape the UN Development Goals that will come into place after 2015, in other words, shaping the world in which they will be adults. This competition is run by The Department for International Development.