Your journey
towards reaccreditation
How you sustain your Gold practice is unique to your school.
We encourage schools to keep Rights Respecting work fresh by trying new things and being creative. We recognise that each of our Gold schools has embraced the Convention in unique ways that suit their school context. We want this diversity of approach to be reflected when we reaccredit you at Gold. Like your first Gold: Rights Respecting accreditation, we use the RRSA Strands and Outcomes at Gold but we don’t ask you to produce detailed evidence against individual Outcomes, just examples under the headings for the three Strands.
You are also invited to showcase one or two particular examples of your continuing commitment to rights based practice. This might be a new initiative, outreach work, supporting Unicef or the RRSA team in some way, or simply keeping things strong in the context of significant changes in school.
Steps to Reaccreditation
The suggested steps below are a timeline from receiving your accreditation report through to reaccreditation. Click on each one for specific practical ideas, guidance and links to other pages.
Being accredited and reaccredited at Gold: Rights Respecting is an incredible achievement and should be celebrated.
Inform the whole school community. You can display your Gold: Rights Respecting certificate and logo, hold an event or assembly, and send out a letter to parents and guardians to let them know.
Think about sharing your report with your Local Authority and other external partners.
If you have developed useful resources for your Rights Respecting work, please share these with us so we can put them on our website and inspire other schools to sustain their Rights Respecting work. You can also share your photos and stories to feature on our website – find a case study template here. Please send to [email protected] when you’re ready.
Are you and your Steering Group continuing to effectively embed children’s rights across the school and into the community? How can your Steering Group maintain this work whilst keeping the CRC explicit? Are there any new ideas you want to try to keep things fresh?
Read more about the Strands and Outcomes at Gold here, and have a look at our ideas to sustain your Gold practice.
Adults at your school and within your school community should know about the RRSA. Have you got processes in place to ensure adults who are new to your school can learn about the RRSA?
How can you continue to explore what it means to teach and learn ABOUT rights, THROUGH rights and FOR rights at Gold?
Use our Teaching and Learning Toolbox and ideas to sustain your Gold practice to help you.
Take into account the recommendations you received from your Gold accreditation or reaccreditation visit. How can you continue to embed your work?
Use our Teaching and Learning Toolbox and ideas to sustain your Gold practice to help you.
Continue to gather evidence against the three strands for RRSA, Teaching and learning ABOUT rights, THROUGH rights and FOR rights.
Download the Evidence Pack Template
Try to capture examples of best practice from across the school. Your steering group members can help to gather this. You don’t need folders full of examples, most schools keep their evidence digitally.
Evidence might include planning, policies, pupils’ work, key events and campaigns. Keep the RRSA Strands in mind.
You will need to share some of these key achievements for your reaccreditation visit.
Pupil and staff questionnaires provide you with an overview of their current knowledge and understanding of children’s rights and the growing impact of adopting a child rights approach in school.
Download questionnaire templates and guidance on our Silver Forms and Guides page
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO DO THE QUESTIONNAIRES?
These questionnaires have a dual purpose:
- They provide schools with a standard approach to take stock of their RRSA progress with pupils and staff at key points
- They provide data for our wider evaluation.
We will use this data for our own evaluation purposes to help ensure that we are having a positive impact on the lives of children. We analyse the data across schools we work with to identify the difference the RRSA makes for children. You can see how we use this information by looking at our impact reports. You may also find it useful to read The RRSA Theory of Change which explains our vision of change for children and schools.
Our evaluation findings are shared with a range of stakeholders who are interested in RRSA – such as schools, local authorities and current or potential funding partners.
London Schools
From April 2025, all London schools are required to use these questionnaires, as part of our funding from the Mayor of London’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU). This data will be aggregated across schools by UNICEF UK into regular reports, which will be provided to the VRU to monitor and evaluate the impact of RRSA. This supports the wider monitoring and evaluation of activities to support their London Inclusion Charter. It is not being collected to assess individual school performance.
From August 2026, questionnaires will be mandatory for all schools.
HOW TO SHARE THE DATA WITH US
Approximately six weeks ahead of your agreed visit date, your Professional Adviser will provide you with access to a portal to upload the data. Please ensure that you add your data promptly and accurately to help support our programme-level analysis of the experiences and outcomes of pupils attending RRSA schools.
To be completed jointly by the RRSA coordinator and RRSA Steering Group, and agreed by the headteacher.
Include key achievements about how you have sustained your practice against the three Strands. Mention any relevant evidence of impact such as feedback from pupil questionnaires, reports from your school inspection body, comments from parents and evidence from school data.
Find the School Evaluation: Gold Reaccreditation form here.
Request a date.
Contact your Professional Advisor with two or three potential dates. Your request will then be shared with an assessor who will contact you to confirm the date and to request a purchase order number for the cost of the assessment.
With your RRSA Steering Group, design a reaccreditation visit programme to showcase your Rights Respecting work to our UNICEF UK assessor(s).
At least two weeks before your reaccreditation visit, submit the following documents to your Professional Adviser:
- Your PowerPoint of Evidence Examples
- School Evaluation: Gold Reaccreditation Form
- Reaccreditation visit programme
Find the forms and guides you need here.