Launched in February, the initiative is the first city-wide inclusion charter designed to reduce increasing levels of violence linked to school exclusions and absenteeism across the capital.
At an event sharing best practice around inclusion from local authorities and schools across the capital, the director of London’s VRU Lib Peck revealed that 24 of 32 boroughs have now signed-up.
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“This has been backed up by 10 boroughs who have already created their own children's rights steering groups to embed a children’s rights approach to drive this commitment forward with their schools,” she said.
The charter runs alongside a £1.4m partnership between the VRU and UNICEF UK to provide children’s rights resources and training to support inclusive practice and engagement for all state-funded school and education settings in London for the next four years.
School’s achievement in putting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into practice within the school and beyond through the partnership will be recognised with a UNICEF Rights Respecting Schools Award (RRSA).
“We’ve seen a 33% increase in RRSA since we launched. This means there are now 460 schools embedding a children’s rights approach.
“Schools in every borough have registered and we’ve seen increases in RRSA in every borough since our offer was launched,” Peck said.
She praised work in areas including Barking and Dagenham which has “been actively promoting the offer to their schools and have more than doubled the number of schools in the borough signing up”.
Meanwhile, sign ups in Waltham Forest have increased by more than a third since the fund was announced in February.
Figures show that the equivalent of 1,430 children lost learning in London each day in 2021/22 due to suspension or persistent absenteeism – up 71 per cent on pre-pandemic levels in 2018/19.
A 2019 report from Ofsted found that children excluded from school were twice as likely to carry a knife, while separate research highlights one in two of the prison population were excluded as children.
A of eight teenagers aged 13 to 19 have been killed in homicides in London so far this year.
All the victims were male, and all of them were killed in fatal stabbings, apart from 15-year-old Rene Graham who was shot dead on Sunday in Ladbroke Grove.
Other victims include 14-year-old Daniel Anjorin, who was killed in a sword attack in Hainault in April.
