At our Residential Weekend at the beginning of November, we had the utmost pleasure of bringing together the Children’s Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) who have been working with us for the past year, and our new cohort of CHRD MCPs, to reflect on all the work they’ve achieved this year and what their next steps might look like.
Today, in honour of World Children’s Day on Sunday, we wanted to share those reflections with you too. We are so fortunate to work with such an incredible bunch of children and it was a delight to bring them together (in person!!) to begin the process of developing their priorities for next year.
Our CHRD MCPs have had an incredibly busy year! They have worked on Professionals Make Rights Real, Mental Health and Wellbeing, Diginity in School and Gender Equality in Education — just to name a few — and then they’ve attended the Cabinet Meeting in March, and met with the Scottish Executive Team in June. They really have been a fantastic bunch, and have taken lots of really big issues to some really big decision makers.
The Annual Cabinet Takeover is a very important date in our diary each year. March 2023 will be our seventh meeting, and over the years our MCPs have taken a variety of different priorities to present:
This year, the children’s priorities were:
As Children’s Human Rights Defenders, it’s important for our MCPs to focus on taking action and making a difference – to identify the issues that are important to children and to take those issues directly to key decision makers. However, it’s also really important that the decision makers listen, feed back and take action. We know that decision makers aren’t always able to do exactly what our MCPs ask for, but it’s imperative — and their right — to have their views taken seriously.
We thoroughly enjoyed being able to share feedback from Director General Education and Justice, Joe Griffin, via a lovely video message, a letter from Women’s Football and an email from the Children’s Rights Unit, with our MCPs during the Residential Weekend. We can’t emphasise enough the impact that being able to share these messages in a more personal way to the children – that reflects the details of their calls to action, and offers a more human response to what next steps are being taken – does have. The children are really excited to hear what future changes will come about as a result of their input. We are keen to support decision makers to continue to update children on the tangible change and impact in this way in the future.
Our MCPs shared their feedback to these responses by designing their own emoji messages, which you can see below:
World Children’s Day is a wonderful opportunity for us too to take a pause, and reflect on all of the fantastic calls to action we’ve heard from our MCPs this year. We are so lucky at Children’s Parliament that every day for us is Children’s Day. We get to focus on and flex our Rights Defenders muscles on a daily basis and consider that the norm. It’s our language, it’s our process, it’s our way of being. We believe this should be the case for every adult in Scotland, and we want to invite everyone to join us in our Unfearties Movement (for *adult* children’s human rights defenders). If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so here, to receive your badge, stickers, reflective journal and access to our community.
We hope that you too are able to spend November 20th this year celebrating the immeasurable positive impact a children’s rights-based approach has for everyone – adults, children and everyone in between – and that you join us on our journey as we continue to support Scotland to become a nation of Unfearties to make rights real for children.