Wearing a white T-shirt and black shorts is a common requirement for PE - but not at Firrhill High School in Edinburgh. Not since students pointed out that with the addition of rain - unfortunately a common occurrence in the Scottish climate - a white T-shirt can become uncomfortably revealing.
S4 student Beth explains: “In the rain sometimes they go see-through so the black T-shirts are better.”
Now the rules on PE kit have been changed and it has also been possible - through the many forums where students can raise issues (more on that later) - for learners to bring to the fore other concerns, including with the way teachers were addressing them in class.
Students wanted staff to move away from phrases like “Right, girls and boys…” when looking to call the class to attention and replace them with more all-encompassing language like “OK, folks…” or “Right, everybody…”.
Ailsa - who was in S6 last year and sat on the school’s Gender and Sexuality Equality Alliance group - says non-binary students felt “excluded and just not comfortable in class” when more inclusive language was not used.
A school listening to its students
Training was therefore developed by students for teachers, and Ailsa says it has made a difference. There is a big emphasis on listening to students’ views at Firrhill High that has grown out of the school’s focus on children’s rights, says Sarah Kerr, a pupil support leader (guidance teacher).
Firrhill - which has a roll of around 1,300 students - is a twice-accredited Unicef Gold Rights Respecting School (RRS). Gold awards are given to schools that have “fully embedded the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into their ethos and curriculum”.
The school, which was also shortlisted for secondary school of the year at this year’s UK-wide Tes Schools Awards, is one of around 20 secondaries in Scotland to have achieved Gold RRS status, and increasingly there is a push to put children’s rights at the heart of Scottish schools.
The Scottish government has committed to enshrining the UNCRC into Scots law. There have been some well-documented bumps in the road - the UK government successfully took it to court over the bill on the grounds that it went beyond the powers of the Scottish Parliament. However, the commitment remains, with the Scottish government saying in June that a watered-down UNCRC bill would be tabled “as soon as possible after the summer recess”.
Curriculum and inspection body Education Scotland says incorporation is “an excellent opportunity to further the rights and wellbeing of children in Scotland”.
In a recent podcast on the incorporation of UNCRC, Education Scotland interim chief executive Gillian Hamilton acknowledged that schools have a lot to deal with just now, but nevertheless stressed that children’s rights were “not an add-on” and should be at the heart of schools’ work.
In the same podcast, Maxine Jolly, a senior education officer for inclusion, wellbeing and equalities at Education Scotland, said children’s rights should underpin the curriculum. A “rights-respecting approach” was about “working with children and young people rather than doing things to them”, she said.
Kerr’s take is similar. Summing up what it means to be a rights-respecting school, Kerr - who leads on Firrhill’s children’s rights work - says it is about “non-discrimination and respect” and student voice.
She adds: “It’s not just listening to pupils’ views but it’s taking them seriously and allowing them to see they’re actually making changes in the school.”
“I make no bones about it, or apology, for the fact we consider the needs of the kids first”
Hence the action over PE kit and the willingness to take on board students’ concerns about teachers’ language.
Headteacher Graham Hamilton gives another example. Several years ago the school was moving to a seven-period day. Students wanted fewer periods in the morning and more in the afternoon because they were “starving” and wanted an earlier lunch - but teachers preferred the idea of having a five-period morning, with just two periods after lunch.
It was the students who won the day.
“I make no bones about it, or apology, for the fact we consider the needs of the kids first,” says Hamilton.
Hamilton embraced the Rights Respecting Schools agenda as a relatively new headteacher - he will soon mark eight years as head of Firrhill - after receiving a visit from pupils in a feeder primary who questioned why they would not be attending a rights-respecting school when they moved to secondary.
They talked with “such passion and conviction and excitement” that he was quickly sold on a rights-based approach. Now, Hamilton describes his school’s focus on children’s rights as “the glue” that holds everything together.
“There are a huge number of schools that promote the right things - inclusion, diversity, tolerance - but sometimes these sit a bit separate,” he says. “The rights-respecting schools agenda binds those themes every school does together in a way that allows everybody to make sense of it.”
Focusing on children’s rights
At Firrhill there is a senior student council that meets with school managers - either Hamilton or a depute headteacher - once a week. There is the Gender and Sexuality Equality Alliance; the Multicultural Club; the Armed Forces Youth Club; and the Rights Respecting Group. There are also student councils for every year group, where Hamilton says students share their views on “usual suspects” such as school lunches but also give feedback on their learning.
The year-group student councils are led by S6 students, who students say they feel more comfortable sharing unvarnished home truths with. Ethan, who was in S6 last year, says he led the 20-strong S2 year-group council with three other senior students and a lot of time was spent “looking at how people felt about their learning and the way their teachers taught them” and “the choices they had in class”.
One complaint, says Ethan, was that too much time was spent quietly working through textbooks, as opposed to taking part in discussions or working in groups.
The school’s students also take part in an anonymous survey that asks about their experience of learning and teaching, although specific teachers are not named. That feedback is then passed on to staff during in-service time.
Hamilton says that good teachers have always been responsive to student feedback “but we’ve tried to institutionalise that and make that structural in our school”. Now, the culture in the school is that “the vast majority” of teachers talk regularly to their students about “how their learning is going, what they are doing in class, what is working and not working”.
He also argues that this culture of listening to students is driving up attainment, and that the focus on children’s rights is helping to address behaviour issues.
Seven years ago, 25 per cent of Firrhill students left with an Advanced Higher; now, 50 per cent do. Hamilton says the school has simultaneously driven up attainment and closed the poverty-related attainment gap.
The improvement has come about by changing teachers’ mindsets - “We shifted the idea that there are some who can and some who can’t,” says Hamilton - as well as “a relentless focus on classroom pedagogy” and data. The school’s teachers have become expert at interrogating, interpreting and utilising student data to improve outcomes, says Hamilton.
All of this has been helped by the school’s focus on children’s rights. “It’s hard to do well in a place you think doesn’t care about you; hard to do your best if you think nobody is really interested,” he says.
When it comes to behaviour, Hamilton says that children’s rights provide a starting point for conversations with students who are not toeing the line. He believes it leads to a more positive approach to behaviour management because the focus is not on sanctions but on the right to an education, the need to defend that right, and the sense that “we are all in this together”.
In 2021 Tes Scotland interviewed then children’s commissioner Bruce Adamson, who said his hope for the future was that Scottish schools would embrace “a rights-respecting approach to education”. He explained that it was about “proper participation”, including allowing “children and young people to be much more part of planning their own learning”.
When Adamson departed his role in May after his six-year term, he was scathing about the Scottish government’s track record on key areas such as closing the attainment gap, but in that 2021 interview there was positivity to be drawn from the many students who told him that they now have “a high level of participation within their schools”.
Schools like Firrhill are at the vanguard of showing what that looks like in practice - and the myriad benefits that can result from making children’s rights a priority.
For those that remain to be convinced, there could hardly be a more passionate advocate than Hamilton.
“It always struck me as a no-brainer,” he says. “There is nothing complicated about it, it’s just the right thing to do…we are standing up for things that are fundamentally important.”
