This paper brings together two distinct but interrelated fields: human rights education (HRE) and safeguarding. It endeavours to show that the former can be beneficial for the efficacy of the latter. By extending an argument put forward recently by Laura Lundy and Gabriela Martínez Sainz, and subsequently by me in a Human Rights Education Review article, that for Human Rights Education to be effective it must enable children to recognise and respond to lived human rights injustices, the paper places this important issue within the existing framework and processes associated with safeguarding young people in formal education. It attempts to both elucidate and consolidate the connection between HRE and safeguarding, arguing that if HRE were to become an integral part of safeguarding training and delivery, children may be better equipped to recognise and speak up about violations of their human rights, rather than relying on a passive system of adult observation.

This paper places these arguments in the context of an empirical study carried out by me, together with my Co-I, Dr Ruth Brittle, in 2021, which sought to tentatively map the landscape of the interaction between HRE and safeguarding in the separate jurisdictions of Scotland and England. I will present the findings from our scoping survey, offering a glimpse into current attitudes and practice amongst teachers and Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs)/Designated Child Protection Officers (DCPOs) in England and Scotland. I will then discuss some of the interesting points raised by the data and offer some tentative concluding observations, as well as suggestions for areas of future research.

If teachers currently lack knowledge and confidence on the topic of human rights, having received little or no training in this area, then simply dictating that HRE should form part of existing safeguarding guidance and training is likely to be an ineffectual route to meaningful change. By mapping a small part of the landscape in this area, we gained a better understanding of the current interaction between safeguarding and HRE in each jurisdiction, thus enabling us to start a conversation about how best to approach the next steps of introducing meaningful change in safeguarding practice that will be beneficial to researchers and practitioners beyond the UK context.

In order to map the landscape as fully as we were able, we created a survey (using the platform SurveyMonkey) that collected scoping data from: (i) primary and secondary teachers; and (ii) Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs) in England and Designated Child Protection Officers (DCPOs) in Scotland, regarding their knowledge of, and attitudes towards, human rights. The overall aim of the survey was to tentatively evaluate the extent to which human rights approaches are embedded in school safeguarding practices in both England and Scotland. Data was gathered through a simple survey comprising 13 questions around HRE and safeguarding. The survey was sent to state primary and secondary schools in both countries, including academies and Multi Academy Trusts (MATs). We focused upon England and Scotland in order to compare knowledge of, and attitudes towards, human rights between the two nations, particularly in light of the Scottish Government’s impending incorporation of the UNCRC into domestic law. With existing research suggesting that attitudes to human rights in Scotland may generally be more positive than in England, we were keen to find out if this tracked through to formal education. We received 617 responses to our survey, comprising 380 teachers and 237 DSLs/DCPOs. Unfortunately, time and ethical constraints meant that we were unable to circulate a second survey we had prepared amongst children and young people. We recognise that this limits the value of our data set, as the voice of the child is conspicuous by its absence. We are instead relying on teachers reporting to us what they believe children know and feel about the topics covered in the survey. This is far from ideal and, indeed, speaks to a broader problem (that lies beyond the scope of this paper) of constraints imposed by university ethics committees severely curtailing the abilities of researchers to work directly with children. By allowing adults to speak on behalf of children in this research, we are failing to practice what we preach about the importance and centrality of children’s voices. Faced with the choice between speaking only to teachers or abandoning the research, however, we felt that the former was the preferred course of action, and we agreed to pursue a separate follow-up study that would elicit the views of children on this topic.

Our data revealed that Scottish teachers and DCPOs tended to have better knowledge of human rights and the UNCRC than their English counterparts. There are various reasons why this is likely to be the case, all relating to the more central position of human rights and the UNCRC within the Scottish educational policy landscape. The UNCRC underpins key legislation and policy documents that inform Scottish educational practice, including: (i) GIRFEC; (ii) the Early Years Framework; and (iii) The Standard for Provisional Registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland. References to the UNCRC within these documents is ostensibly resulting in human rights terminology being mainstreamed to a greater extent in Scottish teaching practice. The majority of teachers in both jurisdictions considered human rights to be taught as part of the curriculum, either in planned lessons or in assemblies. This is particularly the case with regard to primary teachers and DSLs/DCPOs across both nations; with the latter category being the most confident that HRE is happening in one form or another. This is a positive finding, and it is particularly reassuring that those whose job it is to safeguard children are most confident of the place of HRE within their schools. There is still work to be done, however, with teachers and DSLs/DCPOs in both Scotland and England reporting that human rights are not taught at all within the curriculum (including in assemblies) or that they are unaware as to whether such teaching is happening.

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