Advancing The Curriculum For Excellence Through Rights Respecting Schools

At Elie Primary School, we have quite intentionally used our Rights Respecting Schools work as a vehicle for promoting both the principles and the outcomes and experiences of the Curriculum For Excellence. As a small school of 49 pupils, our initiatives have closely involved all our pupils, staff and parents as well as intensifying both local and global community links.

This seminar will focus upon the ways in which RRS work can develop further the innate sense of fairness which even very young children can exercise in making judgments in everyday life. We will report upon the ability of RRS work in engaging children in an urgent and powerful fashion and its almost endless potential for further development. With rights come responsibilities and this along with the CfE values of compassion, integrity,wisdom and justice, form a value based foundation to our whole school ethos.

The shared characteristics and commonality of purpose between the Rghts Respecting Schools initiative and Curriculum For Excellence have become very clear to many schools and teachers. We have found RRS work to be effective in promoting learning in all four of the well known capacities (not just Responsible citizenship) and in providing contexts for all CfE principles. We shall also contend that RRS knowledge and understanding and skills development are relevant to all curricular areas and are particularly useful in cross curricular study.

We will examine the ways in which RRS and CfE mutually complement each other in some detail, with video examples of RRS activities developing different curriculum areas.

The seminar will also explore the impact which pupils report participation in RRS work through Levels 1 and 2 and beyond has had upon their lives. In particular, we will report on a joint enterprise with Henry Hendreson School in Blantyre , Malawi which has greatly extended pupils' awareness of children who do not receive the same rights as themselves. this is illustrated by the following quotes:

'RRS makes you realise how important it is to help children get their rights and makes you realise the difference between wants and needs' P7 pupil

'RRS makes you more aware of your own actions because you think about other people's rights as well as your own!' P7 pupil

Finally, we have been particularly interested in making this work exciting for our younger pupils and have successfully operated a number of vertical groupings in which older pupils and particularly those belonging to our RRS Working Party take responsibility for leading learning sessions with younger pupils. Similarly four of our older pupils have trained as peer assessors in helping to assess schools applying for their Level 1 award. We will make the connection between these activities and the 'application' dimension of assessment.

Maggie Mackay

Maggie has been a teacher and Headteacher for over 20 years. She developed a keen interest in Citizenship when she temporarily left the teaching profession to raise her children and undertake Open University Studies. She has been the Headteacher of a Special School for pupils with severe and profound learning difficulty which enhanced her awareness of inclusion and equity issues. She has also been Headteacher of two small primary schools in Fife. 

She is committed to lifelong learning and hope to convey that enthusiasm in my daily work within the school. She has found Rights Respecting Schools to be an especially useful in implementing the Curriculum For Excellence and believe that work in this area provides a rationale for positive behaviour management and for the school ethos.