Rights Respecting School

As a Rights Respecting school, we are teaching about rights, through rights and for rights: the adults in our Merchiston Community are the duty bearers and our pupils are the rights holders.

Merchiston has been awarded Gold accreditation as part of the UNICEF Rights Respecting School programme, which is designed to put children's rights at the heart of schools in the UK. Merchiston previously achieved UNICEF’s RRS Bronze Award in June 2019, followed by Silver in March 2022 and Gold in 2024.

The Award Programme is based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) recognises a school’s achievement in putting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into practice within the school community and beyond.

Rights Respecting Conference

We hosted the first Edinburgh based Rights Respecting Conference, in February 2024 and followed this up with our second Conference in February 2025. The Pupil Rights Respecting Group were involved in the planning of this year’s event – designing the conference booklet and lanyards, as well as the programme for the day itself. They supported the conference on the day – as Conference Ambassadors.

As part if the event delegates presented the work they are currently undertaking within the Rights Respecting Schools Award; they also participated in workshops aimed at designing a framework for a Rights Award, that organisations/services/people, who are championing children’s rights through their work, could be awarded. All of the ideas generated from the conference workshop will now be progressed by a Rights Award Pupil Working Group.

Other current projects that the Pupil Rights Respecting Group are working on include:

Introducing Rights to our forest Nursery and Forest School

• We are going to introduce the concept of Rights Respecting to our new Forest School – which has boys and girls from ages 3 to7
• We are going to look at any local nurseries that have introduced the concept of Rights Respecting - to see if we can learn from them and find out some good ideas to use for ourselves

Introducing a Rights based Rewards System

• We are going to use the concept of Rights Respecting to introduce a new School Rewards System
• The criteria for our Reward system will be based on our Core Values and our Merchiston Community Charter.