Putting children's rights at the heart of services for children

By Naomi Danquah, programme director, Child Rights Partners, Unicef UK  

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the world’s most comprehensive and widely ratified human rights treaty, has had a profound impact on the way we view and work with children and young people since it was signed by the UK government 25 years ago.

The UNCRC has fundamentally shifted the mindset in public services, so that the once radical idea that children should be heard and have a say in matters affecting them is now common place. However, too many children in the UK still do not enjoy the full range of rights, with some groups such as care leavers, unaccompanied asylum seeking children and young people in trouble with the law at particular disadvantage.

The Child Rights Partners programme was set up by Unicef UK in 2013 with an ambition to improve conditions for children and young people in the UK by supporting local authorities and their partners to understand and apply children’s rights principles in the planning, design and delivery of services and the shaping of local policy.

In close collaboration with five councils across the UK – Leeds, Newcastle and Tower Hamlets councils in England; Derry City & Strabane District Council in Northern Ireland; and Glasgow City Council in Scotland – we are working to close the gap between theory and practice by turning the UNCRC into a practical tool and establishing live examples of child rights in practice.

The programme has seven core principles that underpin the work it does – dignity; best interests of the child; non-discrimination; life, survival and development; participation; transparency and accountability; and inter­dependence and indivisibility
(or holistic).

Supported by guidance, descriptive indicators and training, these principles provide a common framework for putting rights into practice in public services at all levels, from strategy and policy to frontline practice.  

Local implementation

The approach is flexible and adaptable to a range of service areas (see case studies). For example, Tower Hamlets has been using the approach to frame the commissioning of new services, starting with a substance misuse service, as well as the development of their borough-wide children and families plan.

Glasgow is using the approach to assess and redevelop existing service provision for care-experienced young parents as well as the commissioning of early years services across the city.  

Leeds and Newcastle are both beginning to use the approach to look at different aspects of their services for looked-after children including corporate parenting and pathway planning, and Derry & Strabane are using the approach to develop their new wellbeing focused community plan.

We are acutely aware of the challenges ahead. For example, how can practitioners and service commissioners work to protect and promote the human rights of children at a time of diminishing resources and when thresholds for referrals into services are so high? Yet we’d argue that it’s just these challenges, coupled with the pace of change in the sector, that makes it more urgent than ever to find innovative ways of working.

Bringing different people and agencies together under a shared universal rights-based framework provides a structured, creative child-centred method for improving children’s outcomes across a range of settings.

Drawing on the experiences of the five areas that have taken part in the programme, here are some of the key lessons so far: