Human Rights Education Creative Competition for Schools

We have had lots of entries for our human rights competition for schools, and you still have a few more days to register and get involved.

Our Human Rights Education – Learning Through Creating competition for schools launched in December 2021 with a vibrant panel discussion.


Chaired by Gawain Little of the National Education Union, the panel included Evadne Bygrave ambassador of The Steve Sinnott Foundation, Daniel Kebede the National President of the NEU, Marie Antionette Corr of The Gambia Teachers Union, Professor Augustin John, writer and education campaigner, and Professor Audrey Osler of University of Leeds and University of South Eastern Norway. The video below is a summary of the discussion, at the end of this post you can watch the whole discussion for inspiration.



Gawain Little: The NEU is partnering with the Steve Sinnott Foundation and the Gambia Teachers Union to launch ‘Creating Change: the world I want to live in’. A competition which aims to encourage young people to make their voices heard on human rights, and to support teachers in the UK and partner countries of the Steve Sinnott Foundation such as The Gambia, with human rights education in the classroom.


Climate change, poverty, access to education, and gender equality, young people's voices must be heard on these issues that impact their lives, their communities, and their world.


Young people's voices matter. However all too often their voices are not heard. This is why the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child enshrined in international law children's right to be heard. This is why we're launching this competition. To provide a platform for young people's thoughts, ideas and voices on human rights.


I'm also pleased that the Steve Sinnott Foundation has led on the creation of a resource pack for teachers, which accompanies the competition, and comprises classroom activities that have been submitted by teachers and human rights campaigners.


International solidarity is a cornerstone of education trade unionism, and I'm incredibly proud of the NEU’s international solidarity work. It is work that's rooted in human trade union and children's rights. Human rights education is about human rights, and for human rights. That means promoting knowledge and understanding of human rights, and their principles, alongside empowering young people to enjoy and exercise their rights, and to respect and uphold the rights of others.



Daniel Kebede: Human rights education is such an important thing to pursue. We live in really precarious and challenging times, where many young people are missing out on education because of the impact of climate change.


Young people want to be educated about human rights. It is vital that we create human rights literate young people. This is a really important competition do just that.



Marie Antionette Corr: This competition is apt, and is very timely for us, especially during these very trying times in The Gambia. We have been given the opportunity of being invited by the Human Rights Commission to be part of the review of the curriculum. So, it is a very good time for us to be involved in this competition.


We are going to promote it and make sure that we include all sectors who work with youth groups, like the Peace Ambassadors, and the Health Educators. We will extend it to them because they need it.



Augustin John: There is a real need to focus children in metropolitan countries like Britain, on human rights abuses in our own space, and understand how that plays into the way education policies and schooling practises are framed.


We need to fight for and demand, that the way schools organise themselves should be against a human rights backcloth, so that they are conscious all the time of the extent to which some of their own regimes are denying children of their human rights.



Evadne Bygrave: From a teaching point of view, creativity is the way forward. This makes it a lot more inclusive, especially for those children who unfortunately are being left behind, because the curriculum is out of their reach.


Using a creative approach gives them that opportunity to get engaged, learn from their peers and learn from their own strengths as well. Many children and young people learn in different ways, and using a creative approach is what's going to support them, and support their learning.



Audrey Osler: The human rights resource pack has an exercise that teachers can do themselves, to find out the state of human rights in their school as they understand it. That exercise also offers students the chance to think about how they understand the state of human rights in the school too. Students and teachers need to have a dialogue about human rights, and each understand the experience of the other.


If teaches and students assume that the school itself is a safe human rights space for everyone, without actually asking young people how they feel, I think that can lead to cynicism. I don't think we should be teaching about human rights without actually finding out how students experience the school.



Gawain Little: Please do download the resource pack and register for the competition. Please encourage schools in your area to use it. Please encourage everyone to get involved, and to make this massively important project a reality.


Please do register for the competition. Please do get involved and let us change education.


As Paulo Freire said, through changing education, we change the people who will change the world, because fundamentally, that's what human rights education, and all education, is about.


“Education does not change society, education changes people, and people change society.” Paulo Freire





Find out more about the competition here:


Sign up for the competition here:



Watch the whole launch webinar video here:



Steve Sinnott • May 29, 2022

36 Bicycles. Countless Futures in The Gambia.

By Ann Beatty • May 20, 2026
How a simple act of practical solidarity is transforming the journey to school in The Gambia’s Central River Region North Policies have been written. Schools have been built. Yet for many children in The Gambia’s Central River Region North, access to education is still measured in kilometres, not opportunity. 

Education for Hope in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous Times

By Laura Griffin • May 13, 2026
‘In a single hour vast tracts of shaded woodland became a jumble of torn trees and upturned soil, exposed to the glare of the summer sun. Such land-clearing events are rare, but forests exhibit remarkable resilience in the face of disaster. I’m told that the Chinese character for ‘catastrophe’ is the same as that which represents the word ‘opportunity’. And, the blowdown, while catastrophic, presented opportunities for many species.’ (Wall Kimmerer, 2003: 89). In the context of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world (Stein, 2021) what kinds of education for hope might support children’s and young people’s critical engagement in local and global issues? In the spirit of exploring the possibilities of hope further, this short article focuses on the area of global citizenship and sustainabilityrelated education. It will briefly open by sharing commonalities across pedagogical approaches that take up the concept and act of hope more critically, and close by offering reflective questions for educators, with suggestions for further reading. Perhaps it is a kind of hope that is grounded in the present, in future reimagining(s), in ethical solidarity, and an acknowledgement of our deep entanglement with the living metabolism of planet earth 1 our singular home (UNESCO, 2021); a hope that engages with complex root causes and lived realities of multiple overlapping crises in critically reflexive and contextually relevant ways. As McCloskey notes, ‘Hope can fire our collective imagination and critical consciousness as a mainspring to activism and intervention in the world.’ (2025: 3). Commonalities across critical pedagogical approaches to hope include: Acknowledging the context of a ‘seamless single story of progress, development and human evolution’ (Andreotti, V.D.O., 2021b Relating to social and ecological justice and the wellbeing of people and planet Using participatory, action-orientated and inquiry-based learning processes Exploring diverse worldviews and perspectives Practising grounding in the present with opening up possibilities for change (relational, embodied, response-able 2 ) Experiencing ‘struggle’ in different forms (dialogical, selfreflexive, open-ended) Engaging individual and collective agency, action and activism Looking for lifelong and life-wide learning and unlearning. 1 See ‘Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness’, in Machado de Oliveira Andreotti. 2021a 2 See ‘Crossing Borders’ in 2 Depth Education “Depth Education and the Possibility of GCE Otherwise, 2021b. Source: Andreotti, V. 2021a & 2021b., Atif, A. (2025)., Bourn, D. 2021., Bryan. A. and Mochizuki,Y., 2024., Giroux, H.A. 2025., Meade, E. 2025. Whilst engaging in the concept and act of hope more critically reflect upon: What kinds of education for hope might you explore further and why? How might you provide generative spaces for engaging in diverse worldviews and perspectives? In what ways can you facilitate individual and collective agency? How might you support learners’ practice grounding in the present in order to relate differently? In what ways can you support learners in navigating complex root causes and lived realities of local and global issues? As Chief Ninawa Hini Kui affirms, ‘The future depends much less on the images we project ahead than on our capacity to repair relations and build relationships differently in the present.’ (Andreotti et al, 2023: 73. An invitation for further reading: Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future . d’Abreu, C., Belgeonne, C., Bourn, D. and Hatley, J. (2025) ‘Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future’. DERC Research Paper 24. London: UCL Institute of Education. Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, V. (2021a) ‘Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism’ , London: Penguin Random House. Development Education and Hope . McCloskey, S. (2025). (ed) ‘Development Education and Hope’. ‘Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review’ , Vol. 41, Autumn. Centre for Global Education, Belfast. Link to and download the full reference list here

I heard it said today by a friend that “You learn a language best when you use it to speak and write about things that are important to you. ”

By Susan Piper • May 6, 2026
This summed up to me about why I volunteer for the Hands Up Project. HUP is a charity trust which, through its network of volunteers, connects children around the world with young people in Palestine. By means of online interaction, drama and storytelling activities, it enables the use of creativity and selfexpression to promote mutual understanding, personal growth, and the development of English language skills. I joined HUP in 2020 during COVID. After going to Palestine in 2017, I wanted to get more involved in working with Palestinian children in schools. HUP gave me the opportunity to link up with schools in the West Bank and Gaza. Every week I’d tell them stories from all over the world, then we’d discuss it, play games and I’d get them to retell it. Sometimes we would work from their coursebook English for Palestine’ in mutual team teaching sessions with their teacher. The simple act of telling a story became much more than entertainment. It became connection, healing, and a bridge to the world beyond their immediate reality to help them improve their language skills, and to give them a platform to speak about their lives in a language that connects them to people everywhere. I loved it, every week, seeing their smiling faces on the screen and building long lasting friendships with their teachers. I even went to Gaza in 2023 and met some of the kids I’d only seen on Zoom. It was a beautiful experience and something I will never forget. As hostilities escalated, I lost contact with everyone. I thought about where the kids were and what had happened to them. As I watched schools being bombed, universities flattened, and people killed in their thousands, I thought about where the kids I’d met were and what was happening to them. I kept in contact with many of the teachers I knew and heard daily news of displacement, destruction, hunger and bombing. Recently, I’ve started to link up again with children in Gaza, and it feels wonderful to be back helping them learn after being denied an education for over two years. Connecting with children in Palestine is more than just words. When a child in Palestine confidently tells their story to someone on the other side of the world, bridges are built, empathy grows, and the world gains a fuller picture of childhood in contexts far from peace and privilege. My work with these children is rooted in the belief that education and voice are inseparable. Through storytelling and English language learning, I witness children not just learning new vocabulary, but reclaiming their narratives, believing in their potential, and finding human connection in a world they perceive has abandoned them. And more than anything, this work reminds us all that children — everywhere — deserve to learn, to speak, and to be heard. Links to HUP information, books and resources: The Hands Up Project BY SUSAN PIPER Susan Piper is currently an ESOL teacher in Oldham, Greater Manchester and has worked in education for over 30 years. She is also a volunteer for the Hands Up Project and is the International Solidarity Officer and President of her NEU district. She believes in quality education for all and aims to make her lessons creative and inclusive so that effective language learning can take place.