Gathering the views of children in your nursery
In our last two blogs, we explored what the UNCRC (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024 is and how it will impact upon your practice.
You now have the tools to consider developing a Children’s Rights Wellbeing Impact Assessment (CRWIA) for any projects you are carrying out. The next step is to consider how to gather the views of all the children in your setting including the youngest.
How do we gather the views of all children in our ELC setting?
In order to gather the views of the children in your setting in a meaningful way, we would suggest that you work with them to create a dedicated children’s rights floor book for the whole nursery. We recommend using SHANARRI wellbeing indicators (Safe, Healthy, Active, Nurtured, Achieving, Respected, Responsible, Included) to organise the floor book. Put a few pages aside per indicator.
The idea is to get the whole nursery (from babies to pre-schoolers) to use the floor book to add observations, comments, pictures, and anything as examples of including children in discussion about their rights. You are aiming to show through the collection of observations, quotes and pictures, that children understand that they have rights and that they are being met.
Top tips for your floor book
- The floor book should be full of children’s language – you want to steer away from adult-led input for this floor book, it is all about children’s engagement with their rights
- Using the SHANARRI indicators to gather children’s views helps to bring a rounded view of how children’s rights are met throughout daily life in your nursery
- It is not just about gathering observational evidence as nurseries would normally do for inspections, developmental progress etc. it is about giving the children the opportunity to voice their awareness that their rights are either being met or not. The staff do need to use their observational skills but in a totally different way from perhaps they have been used to
- There are lots of rich examples of understanding children’s rights in the baby room that practitioners can gather with detailed observations and photographs as well as letting the babies loose on the floor book itself with mark-making
- For non-verbal children including babies, we have to think about their body language and what it tells us. Tune in to the babies, what are they communicating by their body language?
Our UNCRC Toolkit, free for our nursery members includes:
- Step-by-step guide to completing a Children’s Rights and Wellbeing Impact Assessment (CRWIA), including UNCRC article mapping references
- Listen to Me! Children’s Views on Children’s Rights (a support guide to gathering the views of all the children in your setting, including the youngest children)
- Videos and more.
Do you feel ready for enactment of this Act in July 2024? If not, NDNA Scotland have got you covered! Check out all of our resources on our website.
Our resources are free to members. If you aren’t a member and want to take advantage of our resources to help you prepare for the Act then check out our membership offers.
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