Nelson Central Primary School

Staff at HRiE lead school Nelson Central Primary believe that adopting a human rights and responsibilities framework fits in well with the school’s inquiry learning approach and helps to make sense of the possibilities in the revised New Zealand Curriculum.

“We’ve got these children from 5 years to 11 years…we have to ask ourselves how are we going to make it different and meaningful for them? We like to focus on Big Ideas. They really matter because those are the things that will change kids’ lives. Human rights are hard to refute. We’re going to just get on and do it.”

Principal Paul Potaka

Developing class agreements

Many New Zealand teachers start the year with classroom contracts, but the difference in HRiE schools is the explicit linkage to the internationally-agreed rights young people have. At Nelson Central Primary teacher Helen Zachariassen has undertaken this task with much early success.

Making this linkage helps students understand how human rights were negotiated and agreed (a Social Studies achievement objective), adds weight to the agreed rights and responsibilities, and provides a constant opportunity for human rights learning as Agreements are used to guide behaviour.

“I have already been following the outline on how to make a Class Agreement, and with a few changes I have had fabulous responses from the children. I am amazed how many rights they believe they have; it has been great to come up collectively with the related responsibilities. It might be too early to see any great impact but the words ‘Rights and Responsibilities’ flow freely in the classroom. The understanding they have of their responsibilities gives the children a lot more ownership over their behaviour. They are aware of the need to ‘respect’ everyone’s ‘rights’ and this is easily reinforced now with the correct language. I am excited to see how this year progresses through the human rights lens.”

Above, Nelson Central Staff members workshop their ideas for human rights-based education in January 2009.

Inquiry leads to Sierra Leone connection

Under a 2009 school-wide theme of “Citizenship is everyone’s business” students and teachers at Nelson Central Primary School have been looking at various curriculum areas through a human rights lens. An inquiry by students in years 2-4 into children's rights has led to support for a Save the Children project in Sierra Leone. More