CHARACTERISTIC OF CHILD FRIENDLY SCHOOL
The school is a significant personal and social environment in the lives of its students. A child-friendly school ensures every child an environment that is physically safe, emotionally secure and psychologically enabling.
Teachers are the single most important factor in creating an effective and inclusive classroom. Children are natural learners, but this capacity to learn can be undermined and sometimes destroyed. A child-friendly school recognizes, encourages and supports children's growing capacities as learners by providing a school culture, teaching behaviors and curriculum content that are focused on learning and the learner. The ability of a school to be and to call itself child-friendly is directly linked to the support, participation and collaboration it receives from families. Child-friendly schools aim to develop a learning environment in which children are motivated and able to learn. Staff members are friendly and welcoming to children and attend to all their health and safety needs.
A rights-based, child-friendly school has two basic characteristics:
It is a child-seeking school — actively identifying excluded children to get them enrolled in school and included in learning, treating children as subjects with rights and State as duty-bearers with obligations to fulfill these rights, and demonstrating, promoting, and helping to monitor the rights and well-being of all children in the community.
It is a child-centered school — acting in the best interests of the child, leading to the realization of the child's full potential, and concerned both about the "whole" child (including her health, nutritional status, and well-being) and about what happens to children — in their families and communities - before they enter school and after they leave it.
Above all, a rights-based, child-friendly school must reflect an environment of good quality characterized by several essential aspects:
It is inclusive of...