Silver smiles from pupils at St Ninian's High, Kirkintilloch

Since 2019, our Rights Respecting Schools (RRS) group has worked to ensure pupils understand and connect with their rights as outlined in the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child.

When we began our Rights Respecting Schools journey in 2019, and achieved Bronze accreditation from UNICEF in May 2020.

Over the past 18 months we have worked towards Silver. UNICEF looks for schools to make good progress towards embedding the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into their ethos and curriculum.

Our RRS group has been very high profile within St Ninian’s. For the past two years RRS Captains have been working with 15 ambassadors on projects and events.

For example, we raised £607 for UNICEF’S Afghan Emergency Appeal.

A day of fund-raising followed an awareness raising campaign about the plight of young people in Afghanistan.

Our school community raised money to help pay for food, shelter and medical care – basic rights as outlined by the UN.

Events like this help our pupils to understand and empathise with those less fortunate.

Over the past year we have also ran our Rights Respecting Schools podcast (now on Spotify) – interviews with staff, pupils and the wider community.

The podcast has been an excellent way of both raising awareness and teaching listeners about the UNCRC.

The podcast has worked with our library, the Well-bean café, our Equalities group, and raised the profile of events such as Active Girls Day, our school show and Anti-Bullying week.

In November, the RRS group felt our school was ready for UNICEF to assess our progress regarding the Silver award.

Pupils, teaching staff and senior management met with UNICEF and after evaluating our progress, told us we had achieved our Silver award.

We now look forward to going for GOLD!