This research has expanded on the data gathered during a pilot study at a regional university in Queensland, Australia. The aim of the project was to establish the knowledge and understanding of human rights conventions and declarations of 20 teacher education academics engaged in teaching in the Initial Teacher Education programmes within the School of Education. The project that has evolved from the pilot study addresses two overarching questions:

• What is the extent of teacher educators knowledge and understanding of the United Nations conventions and declarations that have a focus on school education
• What attitudes are prevalent in teacher educators to embedding human rights education within the school curricula and classroom environment?

 The project encompasses participants from four universities within different contexts both politically and geographically. They represent an English university that started as a Municipal college in 1908 that gained full university status in 1992; a Scottish university established in 1495; a university in inner city Brisbane that began life as a School of Arts and was granted university status in 1989; and a member of the Regional Universities Network in Australia that began life in 1967 as institute of advance education and gained university status in 1992. The difference in contexts of each partner university is important because it demonstrates the breadth of cultural underpinning that each brought to the research. The pilot study revealed a serious lack of knowledge and understanding of many aspects of Human Rights and the ways in which declarations and conventions impact on education. There is an underlying assumption in society that we know what our ‘rights’ are. This has been demonstrated throughout 2020 and 2021 during which the words ‘Human Rights’ have, because of COVID19, been brought to the forefront of community awareness. In Australia, lockdowns and restrictions to normal freedom of movement and association, have caused some to question whether their ‘human rights’ have been violated. The study replicated and expanded on the questions asked in the pilot study and included follow-up interviews to test whether the results emerging from the original research are replicated in different contexts.

Internationally, the resurgence of Taliban control in Afghanistan is a major source of concern for the human rights of Afghani citizens as a whole with women and young girls in particular. The reluctance of Australia to act timeously to extract Australian citizens and Afghanis with Australian visas is a breach of the nation’s responsibilities to those people. Promises made to welcome Afghanis who worked with Australian troops to protect and re-build the country have been overlooked as Australia has set tight limits to the number of refugees who can enter the country. This is despite the fact that Australia was a founding member of the United Nations and one of the eight countries involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Human rights as well as truth are among the first casualties of armed conflict.

The timing is right to fill the gap in knowledge and understanding of human rights legislation, declarations and conventions globally, nationally and locally. In Australia federal education legislation and policy needs to reflect human rights and ensure that there is scope for learning about them within the Australian curriculum. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) states in Article 42 that: “States Parties undertake to make the principles and provisions of the Convention widely known, by appropriate and active means, to adults and children alike” (1989). Australia is a signatory to the convention. It is now time to enact, through legislation and the school curricula, the obligation that the signature implies.

The research examined the knowledge and understanding of teacher educators (TEs) regarding United Nations (UN) declarations and conventions that include provisions for the education of children and young people. Within the context of this study, TEs are defined as academics who teach into Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes, are permanent staff members or have a contract of not less than one year and who teach into the programmes the equivalent of at least one day per teaching semester week. TEs will be at the forefront of developing ways in which human rights can be embedded within the school curricula because they will be educating future teachers on the intricacies of the declarations and conventions. Deep knowledge and understanding of the declarations and conventions, as well as a positive attitude towards their inclusion within the curricula, will be required by teacher educators. Twenty participants from each of the four universities described in the abstract were selected through a random sample of staff lists. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected through a questionnaire. Further qualitative data was collected through follow-up interviews with self-selecting 10 participants from the original 20 from each participating university. The completed questionnaires will be analysed to: • Provide quantitative data through different responses to the questions requiring a measure on a Likert scale. • Find out the emerging themes from the qualitative data through the written responses to open questions in the questionnaire. The qualitative data provided some themes for the follow-up interviews with 10 of the participants from each university. The interview questions were designed to explore the attitude of the TEs with the following questions: • What do you personally consider to be the place of human rights in the school curriculum? • Have you had experience either personally, or been aware of a student who has experienced, a perceived violation of your/their human rights? • Can you think of any ways in which a person’s human rights may be subtly ignored? • Are there specific areas within the school curriculum that you consider may be more appropriate for the explicit inclusion of education on human rights? The combined quantitative and qualitative data provided a rich source of information on the level of knowledge and understanding of the UN documents mentioned in the questionnaire.

The data from the research is expected to reveal both TEs knowledge and understanding of the relevant UN conventions, declarations and guiding documents as well as their attitude to embedding both the content and spirit of those documents within school classroom practice. The overarching expected outcome is that the United Nations Draft Plan of Action for the Fourth Phase (2020-2024) of the World Programme for Human Rights Education (2019) that sets out a series of issues that can be addressed within an education system’s curriculum will be implemented in Australian schools. The first step will be to encourage the endorsement of the plan within Education Queensland to support the full implementation of The Human Rights Act (Queensland) (2019) and to counter the comments by Ozdowski (2015) that research indicates “Australians, on the whole, have a poor knowledge of their human rights” (p. 542). For the expected outcome to be met, knowledge and understanding of human rights both in domestic legislation such as The Human Rights Act (Queensland) (2019) and following the guidance given in the United Nations World Programme for Human Rights Education (2011) and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights Education and Training (2011) becomes imperative for teacher educators if they are to prepare future classroom teachers to have the skills to provide human rights education in the classroom. Parallel to working with Education Queensland on curricular issue will be working with the Queensland College of Teachers to have the above knowledge and understanding embedded as an essential component of the professional standards for teachers. The development of professional development resources on how human rights could be embedded within the school curricula would be an outcome to meet the learning needs of TEs and classroom teachers

Human Rights Act, Queensland. 5 Stat. (2019) (7 March 2019). Ozdowski, S. (2015). Human rights education in Australia. In J. Zajda (Ed.), Second International handbook on globalisation, education and policy research (pp. 537-555). Dordrecht: Springer. United Nations Human Rights Commission. (2019). Draft plan of action for the fourth phase (2020-2024) of the world programme for human rights education. In. Geneva, Switzerland: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. United Nations (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child. Online. www.unicef.org.uk/Documents/Publication-pdfs/ UNCRC_PRESS200910web.pdf United Nations (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Online. www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ United Nations. (2011). United Nations Declaration on human rights education and training. Retrieved from http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Education/Training/Compilation/Pages/UnitedNationsDeclarationonHumanRightsEducationandTraining(2011).aspx