# Transcript

Esther Saraga

This tape is intended to add to the issues raised in the TV programme on children’s rights and responsibilities, to look at issues raised by that programme and to consider more broadly the implications of seeing children as citizens. I’m joined for this discussion at Childline by Mary McLeod, Director of Policy and Research, and Ann Phoenix, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London.

The TV programme was concerned with looking at children’s rights and responsibilities within a school context. We went to Highgate Primary School because we knew that the children had been involved in helping to develop a code of behaviour, which operates within the school. Ann can I ask you first, what issues did you feel were raised by that programme?

Ann Phoenix

For me the most striking issue that emerged from the programme was that if you treat children seriously, take their views seriously, and really seek to include them in decision making, that they are able very sophisticatedly to engage with issues around rights and responsibilities. So it became immediately clear that all the children recognised that in order to have rights they also had responsibilities and that they also had to listen to each other and to take account of what they all said.

Esther Mary

what were the main issues raised for you?

Mary MacLeod

I think that a great deal of the discussion among the children, and between the children and the teachers, was about bullying, and it’s very clear and has become clear that within secondary schools the best approach to tackling bullying within a school is from the children up. But there is a lot of hesitation about extending that into primary schools because many people feel that children aren’t capable of having these kinds of discussions and of producing rules for themselves and it was really encouraging to see in this school that given the chance children can enter into that whole process and in the end produce something that they then have some ownership of and can feel that they want to go along with.

Esther

Were there any other things in the programme that you felt it showed, you know things that children were capable of which perhaps aren’t always accepted?

Ann

I think there were a number of things. One that struck me was that the children talked about being responsible for each other, so the older children talked about being responsible for the younger children. They showed that they could change their opinions having listened to the democratic process and gone along with what people said, and I think that was most dramatically demonstrated in the Sports Council where one boy said yes he hadn’t liked the decision that had been made, but now he thought that it was the correct decision to have been made.

They also respected each other’s rights. They talked about needs for privacy and so on, and that they would respect each other’s needs for privacy, that was crucial. So they themselves recognised that they had to listen to each other, and that they had to take their rights while still being under control. Somebody put that very nicely when they said, we can do what we want, but still be under control.

Mary

Yeah I thought that in the group discussions that we saw, one of the really lovely things was seeing the way that the children talked to each other, responded to each other, smiled at each other, and you felt here were young people who had relationships with each other that were complex and complicated and kindly as well, and there was a kindly atmosphere and very often again you know young children are seen as being monsters that have to be controlled.

Ann

Because the children were given the opportunity to participate it didn’t mean that they had vastly different views from those of the staff. One of the things that people will note in looking at the film is that the staff said very similar things to the children about what rights and responsibilities should be, so actually there was some sort of agreement about what was important within the school and I think that perhaps some fears about allowing children to actively participate in decision-making is that they will necessarily want to counter everything that adults do, this wasn’t the case in this film.

Esther

You’ve both made it sound as though this is relatively unusual. Do you think that’s the case that this is not a picture of children that is commonly presented, either in school or outside?

Mary

I think it’s not commonly assumed that children at primary school can be involved to that depth in making rules for themselves and I think it’s not as generally assumed that children have a sense of responsibility about themselves and other children. I mean the Children Act for example describes children who can have their views taken into account as children of such age and understanding and the question of course is not settled, what is the age, what kind of understanding, and I think seeing these youngsters we would think, yes these are children that you can ask and involve, and the really complicated questions like where should I be living? How difficult my family relationships are, does that mean that I should live somewhere else? Should I live with my dad? Should I live with my mum?

Esther

I wonder if we can start looking at questions of diversity. What issues were raised for you when looking at that programme, and obviously the children varied, differed from one another in a lot of different ways. Were there particular things that it raised?

Ann

Well there were three issues of diversity that were explicitly addressed through the film, one was to do with the issue of hearing children as opposed to children who couldn’t hear so well, so were impaired in some way, who attended Blanche Neville as opposed to Highgate school.

Another was to do with the issue of gender because through the film there is the issue of what you do about sports and allowing girls to participate. One of the things the school had done was to get girls to play football or to have girls-only football on Mondays and Tuesdays, that was another issue.

And in the class discussion there was a whole issue of racism, as well as in talk from the head about ethnic diversity, linguistic diversity and so on throughout the school, and I think that those three issues are central to thinking about childhood as differentiated. One of the things to always be the case was that people talked about children as if they were somehow unitary, by that I mean as if all children were the same, as if there were no differences between them, the only thing that differentiated them was age, so in other words a developmental sequence differentiated them, they were different from adults.

But now from all the research that has been done, from all the policy and practice implementation that has been done over the years, we have recognised that children are very different and I think that these are key issues, which we need to think about a great deal more.

Esther

It was very clear I think from the programme that those differences, the ones you have identified Ann were apparent in the school and were taken account of, the school was very conscious of them. I wonder to what extent the children were aware of those differences and responded to them?

Ann

I think that the school obviously made a lot of effort particularly with hearing impairment, to get the children to understand, I thought that was an excellent part of the school life that when we saw the sequence of the children listening through a hearing aid, that’s really interesting, its really something that many children are not exposed to. So I would find it difficult to believe that they weren’t aware of those particular differences and differences that many children are not aware of in their primary schooling.

I think how these differences are played out in practice is very complex, very interesting, and I would site the example of one boy who was hearing impaired at Blanche Neville, talking in the sports council about children from Blanche Neville not being included in football games sufficiently, and I think this raises all sorts of interesting issues. One is about inclusion and exclusion and raising the thorny issue of power relations to do with inclusion and exclusion, because it seemed to me that even though this was, I thought, a school with an excellent policy, that had done things that other schools hadn’t done about hearing impairment, that there was still a notion that the children who could hear had the power to include or exclude children who were hearing impaired, and I think that is really important for thinking about issues of disability. I have no easy answers, but actually the power relations are still there in terms of imbalance between those who can hear and those who are much more hearing impaired, or maybe who can’t hear at all.

One of the things that we know from research and from this sort of policy having been attempted before in many schools, I think with a great deal of success in terms of girls inclusion within the school as central rather than peripheral, is that boys don’t necessarily recognise that they are taking a disproportionate amount of time and space from teachers, from the school and so that they feel that they are being unfairly treated when girls are being given a more equal, this is not necessarily entirely equal, but a more equal space, a more equal share of time and I think that it is crucially important that that is dealt with because boys then leave school feeling that schools were unfair to them.

The point I am wanting to make very clearly is not that I don’t think this should be done for girls, I completely agree and it is crucially important, it shouldn’t be left, but there also needs to be alongside that work done with boys around why this is being done and for them to also feel that things are specially for them, or rather to recognise that many things are in any case already specially for them and we don’t know how that was dealt with in school because this is a very short film, but for me it raised that issue and there are further issues around issues of race.

Esther

Just…I was going to say what you have just said is really interesting because in the first example on diversity around disablement it seemed to be fairly clear which group were likely to be excluded and efforts being made to include them in, whereas on gender it is much more complicated because we are saying traditionally it is girls who have been excluded but the efforts to include them, the policies to include them, if one isn’t careful, are actually going to result in boys feeling and perhaps even being excluded from some activities?