Children’s rights in practice: a study of change within a primary school

Abstract

How might a concern with children’s spirituality ‘touch down’ within the different spaces, discourses and performances within a school? This article is concerned with the affordances of children’s rights discourse in relation to young people’s participation, deliberation, and ethical work upon the self, within one primary school in Scotland. We report on the findings of a three‐year research project involving researchers at the University of Stirling in conjunction with Save the Children Scotland that examined children’s understanding of their rights and analysed the impact of increased participation on their understanding, learning, achievement and relationships. Three phases of the project are described here together with a summary of the main research findings. Each phase of the research implicated a range of different theorists in an effort to make sense of the data, including spatiality theory, genealogy of school spaces, and actor network theory. We conclude by giving consideration to some of the complexities involved in constructing the text Promising Rights (Allan et al., 2005 Allan, J., I’Anson, J., Fisher, S. and Priestley, A. 2005. Promising rights: introducing children’s rights in school, Edinburgh: Save the Children. [Google Scholar]) for others to use.