Rights Education for children and young people is an important but understudied area within educational children’s rights research both in Europe and elsewhere. The United Nations connects rights to education in multiple international human rights treaties such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26, United Nations 1948), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 42, United Nations 1989) and the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training (2011). Even so, there remains variability in the framing and substance of rights education for children and young people in its various configurations such as Human Rights Education (HRE), Children’s Human Rights Education (CHRE), and Children’s Rights Education (CRE). For those working in the field of rights education, there is a broad understanding of what it encompasses and why it is significant, but there do not appear to be any agreed definitions of subtypes of rights education aside from HRE (but even this is contested). When there is not a clear and agreed definition for terms used to refer to different forms of rights education or when the boundaries between the different types of rights education are unclear, those seeking to engage with the concepts cannot be sure they are talking about the same thing when planning, delivering, learning, and researching different aspects of rights education. The lack of conceptual clarity makes it difficult to be certain that what is being delivered within a 'rights education’ framework fulfils its obligations.  

A review using systematic processes was conducted to identify the definitions and different configurations of rights education for children used in peer reviewed academic literature. The search was conducted in the EBSCO and ProQuest search engines and resulted in 16 databases yielding 129 records. Application of exclusion criteria resulted in 36 publications for full text review. Each of these records incorporated some form of a definition or description of what the author(s) meant by the rights education term(s) used. An assessment was made of each definition against H. W. B. Joseph’s (1916/1967) criteria for defining terms. This information was used to analyse the characteristics of the definitions to understand how rights education for children has been defined in existing academic research.

Findings confirm that few papers incorporate a specific definition of rights education for children or its subtypes such as children’s rights education (CRE) or children’s human rights education (CHRE). Despite wide recognition of the connection between rights and education, and education and rights, terms related to rights education are used inconsistently, conflated, and lack an agreed definition. The analyses conducted in this paper point to the need for definitional clarity for each of the terms CRE, CHRE, and Rights Education for Children. This will be of benefit to educational researchers in Europe and beyond.

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