Blog

We're thrilled to share a thought-provoking new blog by Diane Delaney - parent, children's rights campaigner, PhD researcher, and expert with Connect, supporting families to understand their legal rights in education.

In this piece, Diane explores how children's rights, the UNCRC, and frameworks like GIRFEC and SHANARRI can feel distant from everyday family life. She shares insights from her research and decades of professional experience, highlighting how professional jargon can unintentionally sideline children and parents.

Putting Children’s Rights into Practice - By Diane Delaney

I’m a parent, a children’s and parent’s rights campaigner, a PhD student and I work with Connect.  Children’s rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) are fundamental to all of these roles.  

For the past seven years, I’ve been part of the Give Them Time Campaign. I’m active in my local community, serving on my child’s school Parent Council and taking part in community groups.  My PhD research looks at the role and value of parents and carers as they work with professionals about their children’s health, wellbeing and development, focusing on children aged 3-5yrs.  I used the UNCRC, the Scottish Schools (Parental Involvement) Act (2006), and other policies as the basis for my research, and in my work with Connect, who are a national organisation supporting parents and carers to understand their legal rights and role in their child’s education.  

Reading school policies, speaking to educators and trying to be involved in the world of education can sometimes feel like being exposed to a whole new language.  Words like ‘whole child’, ‘parental engagement’, ‘GIRFEC’ and ‘SHANARRI indicators’ often make sense to professionals, but for parents and children they can be confusing and sometimes alienating.   

Quite often in any profession or sector, the words they use are not created by children.  They are adult made words, concepts and policies meant to guide and support professionals.  However, they are not always easy for families to connect with or understand.  

In Scotland, children’s wellbeing is guided by the Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) framework, which helps professionals understand and meet children’s needs.  Within GIRFEC there are SHANARRI indicators (Safe, Healthy, Achieving, Nurtured, Active, Respected, Responsible, Included).  These are the areas professionals consider when supporting children and young people.  By using the SHANARRI indicators professionals aim to work with children, their families and others in their lives to understand how children are doing, feeling and to make sure every child feels happy, safe and supported.  

On paper, this sounds like children’s wellbeing, needs and rights are front and centre.  These can be helpful tools for professionals; indeed they are tools I’ve used as a professional working in health, social care and education for nearly three decades.  Therefore, I also know as a professional that in practice, professional jargon can sideline children and families, making it harder for them to feel empowered, involved and understood.  

Using GIRFEC and the SHANARRI indicators as an example to illustrate this point, let’s consider the indicator ‘achieving’.  For professionals, a child ‘achieving’ might mean developmental or academic milestones, individual targets or measurable progress.  But for a child, achieving might look like drawing a picture, making new friends, building with blocks, learning to ride a bike, going on a swing for the first time.  Achieving indeed has meaning, but probably not in a way that children naturally use or recognise, and quite possibly their parents don’t either.  

One of the key findings from my PhD research is that these differences matter: parents and professionals often have different perspectives, experiences and understanding of concepts, which lead to mismatched priorities and sometimes tensions.  When the words don’t make sense to children or parents, or they are spoken to us, or we are told about them, it doesn’t mean we understand them, or agree on their meaning, and sometimes it is easy to feel left out of conversations as a result of this. 

Taking a children’s rights approach means embedding children’s rights into professional practice in ways that acknowledge, include and respect children and families.  This requires professionals to listen carefully and use the language of the child or family.  The UNCRC is clear that children have the right to express their views (Article 12), and should get information in the way they understand (Article 17).  If children only hear terms like ‘achieving’, ‘nurturing’ or ‘active’ because an adult tells them so, are they truly participating in discussions, and decisions that impact on them? Are the adults really listening?

I value GIRFEC as a framework. It’s not perfect, however, I love the aspiration of working to get it right for every child.  I am using GIRFEC as an example to make a point in this blog: much of the policy, guidance, law, education and support around children has been created by adults, usually for professionals working with children and families. As parents, we don’t refer to our children as ‘the whole child’, we don’t refer to our role as Parent Council members as ‘parent engagement’, and children may not use terms like ‘nurtured’ or ‘responsible’.  Instead a child may say ‘I like hugs from my mum’, or ‘I feel safe when my teacher listens to me/ doesn’t shout at me’, or ‘at home, I help to feed my cat’, or ‘in school, I put my crisp packet in the bin’. 

To make schools and communities genuinely rights respecting we need to use children’s own words to describe their views, needs, likes and experiences.  Parents should also be partners, not just passive listeners or survey respondents.  Jargon needs to be turned into words that have real meaning in the context of children and families lives. For example, if you claim a ‘whole child’ or ‘whole family’ approach, do you consider the family, and the child’s wider life circumstances in decisions made by individuals in the school that impact on them?  Do school policies fit with family life and community needs? 

Respecting children’s rights means looking at the world through a child’s eyes.  That is what they feel, see, notice and experience in their own words, not just through the jargon and rhetoric that professionals use and work from.  Most of us know that children’s lives are unique, and that uniqueness is based on their lives being influenced by the people, environment, circumstances and many other factors surrounding them.  By using children’s language and perspective in practice, policies stop being rhetoric and abstract jargon to making a real difference in children’s lives every day.  Hopefully resulting in happy children, who want to learn and feel good about school. 

The challenge is turning children’s rights from words in a policy, or guidance into real, everyday experiences that children and families feel, see and benefit from.