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Article 29 and Its Translation into Policy and Practice in Scotland: An Impossible Right to Education?

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Children’s Rights from International Educational Perspectives

Part of the book series: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Educational Research ((TPER,volume 2))

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on the intersection of the right to education through UNCRC Article 29 with traditions of education. It is, therefore, concerned with some of the implications of translating this legal text into the specific educational contexts impacting on the lives of children and young people at the present time. The chapter, therefore, responds to recent work in the field of children’s rights that calls for approaches that are both more critical and more theoretically adventurous. This critical and theory-informed approach necessarily extends to thinking about the kinds of education that are both implied and enacted – in the name of the UNCRC – within particular settings. Here, a case study of the translation of children’s rights within the context of the Scottish education system will ground the discussion and help surface assumptions that might otherwise remain hidden. The chapter concludes with some observations concerning difficulties faced in constructing a universal appeal to education and, in the light of this, the importance of attending to ways of negotiating difference.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The focus on the processes of translation from finished text (UNCRC) to its material instantiations also tends to eclipse from view the process of the text’s own construction during the years 1979–1989: see Quennerstedt et al. (2018) on this.

  2. 2.

    Space does not permit a detailed analysis of the understandings of ‘health and wellbeing’ that are in play in this discourse: on this, see Spratt (2016, 2017) for a detailed account.

  3. 3.

    In Scotland, the General Teaching Council Scotland (GTCS), the official body responsible for teacher registration, has various Professional Standards for different roles and stages in a teacher’s career, each with multiple indicators (GTCS, 2019). School Inspectors use a text entitled How Good is our School? (Education Scotland, 2015), which consists in hundreds of performance indicators (renamed “quality indicators”) that are used to assess educational practice. As regards the latter, it is noteworthy that at no point is the “good” in the title actually defined; it is simply resolved into a successful alignment with the aforementioned performance indicators.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland

    John I’Anson

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  1. John I’Anson
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Correspondence to John I’Anson .

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  1. Faculty of Creative Industries, Education, and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

    Jenna Gillett-Swan

  2. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Nina Thelander

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I’Anson, J. (2021). Article 29 and Its Translation into Policy and Practice in Scotland: An Impossible Right to Education?. In: Gillett-Swan, J., Thelander, N. (eds) Children’s Rights from International Educational Perspectives. Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Educational Research, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80861-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80861-7_2

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