Silver: Rights Aware

Silver: Rights Aware is the second stage of the Rights Respecting Schools Award.

It is granted by UNICEF UK to schools that show good progress towards embedding children’s rights in the school’s policy, practice and ethos, as outlined in the RRSA Strands and Outcomes (see Silver Forms and Guides) .

To achieve Silver: Rights Aware, schools will be assessed by one of our Professional Advisers who will look at the whole school’s rights respecting work.

Your Silver: Rights Aware accreditation is valid for three years, after which you will need to be accredited at Gold: Rights Respecting.

Achieving Silver: Rights Aware means there is evidence that:

• Your school is explicitly embedding the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in its policy, practice and culture.
• You are promoting knowledge and understanding of the Convention throughout your school community.
• You are putting into action and developing the plans outlined on your Action Plan for Silver, which you submitted to achieve Bronze: Rights Committed.
• You are beginning to see the positive impact of these actions on children and young people, staff, and on the school’s ethos, practice and environment.
• Children and young people are beginning to see themselves as rights respecting global citizens and advocates for fairness and children’s rights, both locally and globally.

Progress towards Silver tends to happen organically and every school will work in a slightly different way. What you are aiming for is:

1. Teaching and Learning about rights: for the whole school community through training, curriculum, assemblies, topics, focus days/weeks, displays.
2. Teaching and Learning through rights: by modelling rights respecting language and attitudes, and making strategic decisions that involve students.
3. Being ambassadors for the rights of others: developing as rights respecting citizens.

Take a look at our Teaching and Learning Toolbox for more detail on this.

Our e-Learning course Strengthening RRSA Online and our Achieving Silver training course provide opportunities to gather practical ideas on implementing children’s rights in school. You can also discuss achieving Silver with others through our Support Workshop for Silver which run once every a month. See the Training section for more information.

Do you ever take an Award away from a school?

The Rights Respecting Schools Award is based on nationally agreed standards and uses a system of accreditation (as explained above) that looks at all aspects of the school’s life and work. Similar to other inspection processes, the accreditation is made on the evidence seen during the accreditation visit. Individual situations and experiences outside the accreditation process cannot, on their own, determine the school’s accreditation as Rights Respecting but we do take concerns seriously.

If a Rights Respecting School experiences an event or circumstance that puts it at odds with its Rights Respecting status (at either Silver or Gold), the Programme Director may ask that the school be reaccredited sooner than the three-year life of the Award. This would be done to support the school at a difficult time and, out of respect to all our other schools, to maintain the consistency and status of the RRSA. In exceptional circumstances, we reserve the right to suspend an Award.

This approach has been approved by our Schools Accreditation and Standards Committee and this is made clear to schools at the time they are awarded Silver or Gold.