Blog Layout
Human Rights Day 2020 - Children’s Rights Are Human Rights
Human Rights Day is celebrated each year on 10 December, the date on which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. On this day the NEU reaffirms its commitment to fighting for human rights around the world – which are still denied to far too many.
To mark Human Rights Day this year, we were pleased to be invited by the National Education Union (NEU) for an International Webinar to talk about how the Foundation (SSF) is advancing human rights and the Sustainable Development Goals. The SSF works with teachers and educators to deliver projects that ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all.
Thank you to everyone who attended.It was a truly international event to mark Human Rights Day with teachers attending from The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Malawi, the U.K, Northern Ireland and Ireland, resulting in some great ideas to progress Education For All.
The evening started with Jerry Glazier Chair and founding member of the SSF and NEU National Executive member, introduced the history of the Foundation and talked about the work of Steve Sinnott, in which his legacy lives on in the work of the Foundation.
Isata M Kamara talked about our ‘Positive Periods’ campaign which has reached over 60,000 girls in some of the world’s poorest countries, and Marie Antoinette Corr General Secretary of the Gambia Teachers Union (GTU) talked about GTU and SSF working in partnership on rural education.
Ann Beatty Chief Executive of the Steve Sinnott Foundation, explained how the Foundation and their partners have adapted this year to support safe learning during the pandemic and how everyone can do something to support Education for All children everywhere.
Some of the highlights of 2020:
• We have kept over 5,000 children learning in The Gambia through the provision of solar radios.
• Work is nearly complete on our 3rd Learning Resource Centre which is opening in The Gambia in the New year.
• We have sharing learning through online storytelling and setting up the Lifelong Learning webinar series. The partners and teachers we work with are doing amazing work across the globe, and we have been trialling ways to share some of this learning so it’s available to an ever-widening audience. The webinars are carefully selected to support teaching and learning and they may also support building business skills, creativity and wellbeing.
• Our Positive Periods project has had a positive effect on over 60,000 women and girls and we hope it will reach more girls. We are excited to tell you that in Havana they are starting another Positive Periods project with grandmothers teaching their daughters and granddaughters so they get to spend quality family time together too. The Positive Periods project is working in The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Malawi and Cuba and we have more countries waiting.
One thing that the Pandemic has illustrated to everyone is how connected we all are to each other. We do not exist in bubbles, our groups are made up of people in other groups, who are connected to more groups and so on. We have seen not just the virus spread rapidly through a country but also across the world. We are all connected across the world.
It’s the same for education too. If we are able to get access to quality education right in one country, the problems caused by lack of education in other countries are still going to affect everyone globally.
Lack of education, and therefore opportunities, is something we are passionate about changing, we believe that Education is a human right for all children, it should not matter where they were born, who they were born to or their gender, they should expect access to a quality education as that gives them choices for their future.
The Steve Sinnott Foundation is working at a grass roots level to make a change to education across the globe. We do this by working in partnership with teachers on the ground, who scope and manage each project locally, so it is fit for purpose, respects the local culture and is sustainable and where possible replicable. We work with teachers to create independence not dependency.
When we have problems in the UK people may be concerned about how we can fix our own problems, but without fixing problems globally, new challenges will be created, which affect us all equally.
What can you do to support our work?
• You can help us with Resources and research.
• You can write articles for Engage or our blog so we can share all teaching and learning practices globally.
• We would love to work more closely with International Solidarity Officers so please invite us to work with you.
• You can follow us on social media, like and comment to get our engagement levels up.
• Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
• You can share our work with any new partners who might be interested, we believe working together is winning together.
• Finally, most importantly you can ask your districts to support our work, it costs £25 for a good quality solar radio which provides lessons for at least 10 children. So, £500 would buy 20 radios and support over 200 children to access learning.
• The materials and training for a making 5 reusable period pads which last a girl up to 3 years is £3 so if you donate £10 a month that is supporting 40 girls in a year. Once a girl has learned this skill, she can manage her periods independently and with dignity and pride.
If you have any questions or comments please leave them below or email ann.beatty@stevesinnottfoundation.org.uk
The Steve Sinnott Foundation • Dec 14, 2020
Early in my work as the president of my local teacher’s union I was invited to a community leader meeting about reforming the teaching profession. Amidst the discussion of harsher teacher evaluations, raising standards for teaching, creating easier entry into the profession, merit pay for “good” teachers, and more, I brought up the fact that working conditions and salaries hadn’t meaningfully changed since the 1960s. “We’re in favor of paying math and science teachers more so they can be compensated closer to what they’d get in the private sector,” a business community representative replied, offering an idea that was not new to me. Full disclosure: my dad was a career math teacher from that era of math and science majors who answered their government’s call to become math and science teachers who would boost the United States of America’s bench in the space race. I could easily picture how a larger salary could have changed our family’s budget. Teachers’ unions like mine (and my dad’s) addressed pay disparities based on gender that were common a generation earlier by fighting for a salary schedule focused on experience and education. So, I offered back, “If we want to differentiate pay related to the most important job in education, then we should seriously consider paying kindergarten and first grade teachers more than anyone because they teach students to read, which is the rocket science of education,” alluding to an influential issue of AFT’s American Educator magazine from 1999. “Well, I’m sure those teachers are fine but I have volunteered in first grade classrooms and their work doesn’t compare to math and science teachers.” Oh. Interesting. We clearly weren’t going to see eye to eye in our differentiated pay conversation. More so, there are decades long gender stereotypes lurking behind that conversation. In addition to the history of gender based pay inequities, elementary school teachers are assumed to be female while more secondary teachers are male. There has long been a disconnect between the importance communities, elected officials, and countries have placed on education. From local funding efforts to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, support for education is nearly universal in most communities. That support for education doesn’t always translate to support for educators and, with a majority of educators worldwide being female, that sets a dangerous precedent. Our teachers deserve professional working conditions because teaching and learning begins with their expertise. Additionally, a teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions and so administrators, public officials, or policymakers mistreating, undermining, or disrespecting teachers sends a message to students that teachers do not deserve respect, fair treatment, or professionalization. In addition to a stubborn lack of recognition of teachers as professionals, a vicious cycle exists around salary. Teachers have historically low wages because it is feminized and because it is feminized teacher’s wages are suppressed. The evidence that belonging to a union, with the ability to negotiate collectively, improves teacher compensation is key in disrupting this vicious cycle. Teaching has been a feminized profession for over a century and, despite efforts to diversify the profession, remains a feminized profession. In fact, the OECD reports that the gender gap increased from 2005 to 2019. In order for our students to have the most representative learning conditions, we need the most representative teachers so we must continue to diversify teaching to represent everyone in our communities, including by gender. Efforts like Black Men Teach, active in my home state of Minnesota, can make a meaningful difference. I would posit treating the current majority female teaching population as professionals—with professional wages, recognizing their expertise in teaching and learning rather than infantilizing them, respecting their commitment to education rather than exploiting it—would both model for students the way to treat women (and thereby model for female students how they can expect to be treated in any profession) and create the conditions for everyone to see teaching as a profession worth pursuing.
Recently in the UK, there has been a discussion on twitter about whether or not students should be allowed to leave the classroom once a lesson has started. Some assert that letting a child out of a classroom implies that the education in the classroom is not valued highly enough. To paraphrase, ‘students need to know that the lesson is vital, therefore they have to remain in it’. The conversation then moved on to behaviour of students, specifically the idea that students leaving classrooms may engage in graffiti, vaping and smoking in the toilets. Onward, to the lack of support from school leaders who promote poor behaviour by not dealing with it strongly enough. As someone who has been an Assistant Principal for Behaviour and Attitudes, I fully understand the importance of boundaries and structure for young people to learn in. Indeed, for some children school can be their safe space. Order and calm is essential for them. We know from a range of different sources such as Teacher Tapp and articles in the TES, that poor behaviour is often cited as the reason for poor retention of staff. I can simultaneously hold the belief that order, structure and calm are necessary for good learning to take place, and that young people can generally be trusted to take ownership of that learning and their own bodies. Young people are well aware that their education is vital. I think they know this too well and feel pressured. When I was at school, the world was a significantly different place. Education was different. Industries and jobs were very different. Societal pressures were very different and social media didn’t exist. Technology is moving apace, and the jobs of the future don’t exist yet. So why are we so confident that our current ways of teaching and learning are suitable for today’s learners. Our education system is largely unchanged since the Victorian era. The world, however is completely different. This view that learning has to take place in a classroom, with everyone facing forward, in the quiet is not in tune with our modern lives or modern ways of work. I work with organisations who are purposefully giving staff more agency and trust. They support staff to take breaks when they need to and trust them to get the work done to a high standard. They support flexible working. They are working to challenge discrimination. They listen to staff to create a comfortable working environment because they know that this is key to retention and productivity. Education doesn’t seem to be anywhere near this, and more importantly, it isn’t preparing young people for this way of working. What about staff? Post covid the world is changing and teachers continue to vote with their feet choosing different career paths which are more in tune with modern life and reasonable expectations of a person’s stress and work levels. What are we really doing to make education an attractive work environment (note I didn’t say career)? Teachers expect more. As the exchange on Twitter implies, we are not tolerant. We can’t understand that a young person may need to take breaks from pressure. We don’t seem ready to understand that trauma exists, that this might be a factor in a child’s response to what is happening to them and the stressful environment they are in. There continues to be a failure to recognise protected characteristics and the specific challenges these bring to all stakeholders. What if we were able to create a flexible education system which prepares young people for modern ways of working? What if we replicated those ways of working to meet the needs of teachers? Are we making our young people culturally aware so that they can excel in international collaboration that hybrid working has encouraged? If we look at the etymology of the word, ‘educate’, we might want to reflect on: to what extent we are leading our young people and showing them the way? How are we revealing the outside world to them? How are we nurturing and supporting them? Are we looking after their minds? Do we promote intellectual and cultural development?
Gender equality is an international human right – but is it a reality? UN Women was founded in 2010 to accelerate progress in achieving international gender equality. Their key goals are empowering women, reducing economic and political disparities and reducing violence against women and girls.1 But the organisation’s findings are stark. Globally, women earn 20% less than men; only 25% of all national parliamentarians are female; and at least 35% of women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence.(1) Reading these statistics prompted me to reflect on what it’s like to be a woman at this moment in time. At this moment in time, Barbie the movie(2) has just been released to (mostly) critical acclaim across Europe and the US. It is promoted as a movie about a living doll that suffers an existential crisis, exploring matters of life and death, relationships, feminism and patriarchy through glorious – mostly pink – technicolour, sunshine, song and dance. Sounds like harmless fun and potentially a commendable way to provoke conversations about gender equality, right? Not everyone agrees. Barbie has been banned in several countries for reasons including: the promotion of feminist ideologies that demean men (Saudi Arabia), objectionable LGBTQ+ content (Pakistan), promoting homosexuality, sexual deviance and transsexuality (Lebanon) violating Islamic values (UAE), damaging moral standards (Algeria) and inaccurate portrayal of geographical maritime borders (Vietnam).(3) So, not fun, not harmless and not commendable. According to Greta Gerwig, the movie’s director, young girls are funny, brash, confident and play with Barbies, and then they suddenly abandon their confidence along with their dolls.(4) Anyone who has been [or seen] a girl maturing into a young woman knows this is a stereotypical and reductionist description of development. I wonder how valuable Barbie – the doll – is as a ‘source of enrichment’ and as a model of womanhood, when she is eternally adolescent, has unrealistic (and potentially unhealthy) proportions, is sexless, and can seemingly turn her hand to any number of careers at the flick of a debit card, no training required. Barbie is a toy, not a human, and for me the blurring of this boundary blurs the line between fantasy and reality. This can be harmful when the target demographic of Barbie the movie is young women and girls, in particular (the movie is rated PG13). Barbie is a brand, and, at this moment in time, the Western world is in the clutches of Barbie-mania, or, as publicists would have it, ‘Barbie-core’. This is also aimed at women and girls who are being enticed to buy into the fantasy with Barbie shoes, Barbie clothes, Barbie sportswear, Barbie haircare, Barbie toiletries, Barbie jewellery, Barbie sex toys, Barbie home accessories and even Barbie snacks. We are also being bombarded with yet more unrealistic, reductionist, stereotypical, culturally biased images of what a woman looks like in the form of Margot Robbie, the white, blond-haired, blue-eyed actress who plays the leading role. She has model proportions – reportedly 34–24–34 – and a ‘snatched’ jawline – reportedly the ‘perfect’ 125 degrees. Most women and girls do not and cannot match these statistics, but many will try, through restricted eating, skin lightening, hair bleaching or surgery. And when they still don’t ‘measure up’, their confidence will plummet. I have read that Barbie is a ‘commentary on what it’s like to be a woman in the ‘real world’.(5) The reality is that at this moment in time women are still judged on their appearance and sexuality, are still the victims of economic and political disparities, are still likely to experience cultural and age biases, and are still more likely than men to experience physical and sexual violence. I don’t think that Barbie is doing much to change that. References: Gender Equality. www.un.org/en/global-issues/genderequality#:~:text=The%20United%20Nations%20and%20women&text=Among%20the%20purposes%20of%20the,%2C%20language%2C%20or%20religion (accessed August 2023). Barbie. www.imdb.com/title/tt1517268/ (accessed August 2023). Barbie: Which countries have banned the movie?https://uk.news.yahoo.com/barbiemoviebanlis100541130.htmguccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHilWlmnpk_EFd6VZewfkHMvk6eyEZ5k4lexjW19kClehBfx4t85ceGK4-10zvbwzyQctqSiG-Ulkkv4aDuz6Dwh-MqHkmoUJ7C4OtEzLWaq-fIF8QPZ7pI5Ag7ZBbILrPBKSGr5S_NCMkhnbiy6l5VD4yDQlLzghgjDaZjhJWd-(accessed August 2023). Barbiemania! www.vogue.com/article/margot-robbie-barbiesummer-cover-2023-interview (accessed August 2023). Grazia View. Grazia. 8 August 2023.
15 Clarendon Road, Watford, WD17 1JR, United Kingdom
Learn More
0208 013 9616
Sign Up To Our Newsletter
Charity Commission England 1130814
Charity Commission Scotland SCO46031