Human Rights Education: a global framework

Audrey Osler discusses human rights education in a global framework. As well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Convention on the Rights of the Child and Sustainable Development Goals there are many social movements for justice.

This framework provides legitimatisation for justice orientated work to empower students, and offers an alternative frame of reference for diversity in the student population.



It empowers young people by putting their concerns at the heart of schooling, teaches them life skills and how to make a difference.


Audrey Osler: I want to commend the NEU, The Gambia teachers union and the Foundation for working on this practical resource and competition which can engage everybody.


What is human rights education in a global framework? First we need to look at the successes we can celebrate in human rights education over the past years, and then look at some challenges.


The legal framework for human rights education is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child and also the Sustainable Development Goals which support many of the goals of human rights.


These first two important international agreements don't just guarantee the right to education but they actually guarantee the right to human rights education. If you read the aims of education in the Universal Declaration you will see that they actually require an education which is in conformity with the ideals of the UN, and likewise in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It doesn't just guarantee every child an entitlement to education, it actually spells out that all children have the right to a human rights education.


Teachers, and particularly teachers unions, can work hard to communicate this because this point isn't as widely shared as it could be. Even amongst education professionals, let alone amongst governments, who decide what they think education should be about.


We've got this global framework but we've also got very important social movements for justice. Over recent months, particularly during the pandemic, we've seen how people have been moved to show generosity, solidarity, extend kindness to others, and fight for justice globally. Building on Black Lives Matter in the United States, the Me Too movement, and Youth for Climate Justice.


Our NGOs and trade unions have a key part to bring these together. To bring social movements and awareness of the international agreements together. Raising awareness of what they actually mean in terms of human rights education.


How then is the global framework useful for teachers?


Many teachers may struggle to engage in questions around justice, they may struggle to express points of view which are unpopular, or unfashionable with their government.


The international agreements support human rights education. That gives extra power and confidence to teachers, in many situations and it enables them to share that knowledge with their students.


Human rights education offers an alternative frame of reference to narrowly focused national values, that are sometimes promoted. It is really important amongst student populations who are diverse in their make-up. That's a very powerful element of the human rights framework.


How can it empower children and young people?


The Convention on the Rights of the Child places children's views, experience and concerns at the heart of schooling. This is an important point. Some people may be anxious that children's concerns and experience of their rights sometimes may be in competition with those of adults, carers and parents. It's important to understand that the links between children's rights being put at the front, and those of parents and teachers, don't by any means have to be in conflict.


Human rights skills are life skills. They are important for all children to learn co-operation, mutual respect, solidarity, learning to live together, and protecting the vulnerable. That's the key point about human rights, and human rights education.


Human rights are about protecting the vulnerable, and it's important to remember that all of us are vulnerable at some point. Recognising that helps us frame solidarity in a framework which is much more equal. It's not giving to others, or being generous. It's actually mutual support.



Children can learn how to make a difference. It is clearly empowering when young people feel they can make a difference, that is going to change the whole atmosphere of school.


What are some of the successes of human rights?


Over the years we have seen global movements make a difference. We've seen UNICEF working on rights respecting schools, in the UK and also child friendly schools in other places too.


Another success for human rights education is the public awareness of concerns like homelessness, sexual harassment, climate change, and many other issues. The rights of sexual minorities is increasingly recognised by the public as human rights issues. Human rights do not just belong to others but they are the rights of us all.


We've seen the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child incorporated into domestic law in so many nations. This hasn't happened yet in the United Kingdom, but we've seen a strong effort to make that happen in Scotland. Although there was a challenge in the High Court, people are working very hard to ensure that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is incorporated into domestic law, which teachers, and teachers unions, can pay play a very important role in.


Another success of human rights education is demonstrated by organisations ready to step in and step up when governments fail. Governments have an obligation to ensure that children have the right to human rights education, and to uphold our human rights. When they don't do that it is our obligation as citizens, to step up and make that happen.


Teachers unions internationally, offering training programmes in human rights education, is encouraging. This is happening in our universities, although there is still very little opportunity for teachers to study human rights on a uniform basis. Across the board it is growing, but it is not by any means a guaranteed part of initial teacher training.


In many places human rights education research is now recognised, there are people studying in this field, doing PhD’s, and research is now available to teachers. In the last five years we now see journals on human rights education available to teachers, they are Open Access so there is no paywall, available to teachers and to the public.


Since I've been closely involved in the journal  Human Rights Education Review, we've published the first article on human rights education in Nigeria, by a young scholar raising many real issues and suggesting ways forward for human rights education in that context.


Where are the challenges?


Human rights remain something that we often see that we have, but there is still very much a divide between those who have access to them and those who don’t.


Human rights education is sometimes presented in established democratic countries, as if human rights are assumed, and that in other countries people don't have them. There is a risk in human rights education of promoting a sense of superiority, and we need to guard against this, looking carefully at the human rights violations in our own countries.


The international growth of authoritarian regimes across the world is another threat to human rights education. The inflexible curriculum frameworks in schools, accountability mechanisms, and inspection regimes, that give very little attention to principles of creativity and our shared humanity. We need to tackle these, recognising their threat not just to well-being but to human rights.


There is a challenge still in building solidarity across different organisations, and across different struggles for justice. Those that are building solidarity across different sites offer a means of strengthening the field, but it remains a challenge.



Bringing this competition into schools will start many vital conversations about all these issues with young people.

Find out more about the competition here.




Human Rights Education Review is  Open Access, meaning  the articles are not hidden behind a paywall but available to teachers and other education professionals.


By Audrey Osler • April 11, 2022

The Importance of Holocaust Education in Schools

By Hedi Argent • April 29, 2026
The aim of Holocaust education should never be to introduce young people to the details of the horrors of the Holocaust, but to help them to understand how it could happen: what led up to it, and to recognise how conspiracy theories, fake news and disinformation lead to prejudice. And how prejudice leads to racism – and when racism is allowed to flourish, then there is no limit to what can happen. I give talks mainly to students in Year 6 who are in the last class of primary school. They are good listeners and generally uninhibited about interacting and asking searching questions. Some talks inevitably have to be on Zoom because of unmanageable distances, but there is an advantage because several schools can participate and I have spoken to as many as 500 children in one session. With a bit of technical luck, I can see them and they can see me as well as PowerPoint illustrations. I talk about my own experiences as a child and how my cousin and I became the targets of racism and learned how antisemitism, surely the oldest form of racism, felt as well as what it meant. Our stories had very different outcomes: I was lucky and survived. I came to England with my parents. We discuss what refugees may bring with them and what and who they must leave behind and how that may feel. I encourage them to listen to others’ stories and to tell their own – we all have stories to tell and they help us to welcome strangers, not to fear them. My cousin was not lucky. He was one of six million who were not lucky. The children and I explore together what 6,000,000 means. We stand and I tell them that the late Chief Rabbi of the UK, Lord Jonathan Sachs, once worked out that if we stood for just one minute to commemorate each of the 6,000,000 we would be standing in this place for 11 years and 4 months. We talk about who can do such things? and I stress that there are no bad people but only people who do bad things. I give examples of kindness: a child who played with me when the other children and teachers in my school shunned me and called me names, a man in the Nazi party, who knew and saved my father when he was arrested, and a doctor who took me to hospital, where Jews were not allowed, when I nearly lost a finger. Eli Wiesel, an author, who witnessed the worst terrors of the Holocaust as a child in the camps, once said that when we tell our stories, we share the responsibility of being a witness and when enough of us become witnesses we may never let it happen again. BY HEDI ARGENT Hedi and her parents came to England as refugees from Austria in 1939. Hedi spent most of her working life in Social Work specialising in the adoption of older children and children with disabilities. She has written and edited more than twenty books on the subject and is still working and speaking in schools about the Holocaust and what it means to be a refugee. Hedi has recently written her own story and has donated the royalties from her book sales to the Foundation. She is also an ambassador for the Foundation.

NAPTOSA DIGNITY DEFENDERS PROJECT - What Does It Mean to Be a Boy in Today’s World?

By Joenty Ngoma • April 27, 2026
What does it mean to be a boy in today’s world? Is it to be watched, managed, expected to fail before you even begin, or is it to be shaped, trusted, and taught how to carry dignity without dropping it? That question followed me off the bus at the Dignity Defenders camp. The air was thick with uncertainty. Boys from different schools stood in long, uneven lines, gripping oversized bags under a sun that felt far too awake for how unsure we all were. One by one, police officers searched through our belongings at the gate. No introductions. No explanations. Just hands in bags, eyes scanning for what might go wrong. The message landed quietly but firmly: we were not trusted. At first, it stung. I looked around at the boys beside me, some nervous, some joking too loudly, some silent, and none of them looked like criminals or threats. They looked like boys carrying more than just clothes: expectations, pressure, unfinished childhoods. And yet, here we were, treated as potential problems before we were given the chance to be people. Still, honesty matters. An all-boys camp does sound like something that could collapse into chaos if left unchecked. In a world already strained by conflict and unrest, caution becomes a reflex. That gate, uncomfortable as it was, became the first lesson: when society loses trust, control rushes in to fill the gap. What followed, however, was not control, it was education in its most human form. We were separated from friends, gently but deliberately, nudged into unfamiliar conversations. We slept in shared dormitories; bunk beds stacked like unspoken agreements to coexist. Slowly, the tension softened. The space began to feel less like a holding area and more like a classroom without walls. One speaker, calm and sharply articulate, spoke about substance abuse. When he revealed that he was a former drug addict, the room shifted; not because of shock, but because of contrast. He did not look broken. He looked rebuilt. His story dismantled the idea that one mistake writes an entire future. It reminded us that education is not about erasing the past but understanding it well enough to move forward. Later, a boy raised his hand and admitted he used substances to cope with stress at home. There was a brief, fragile silence. Then someone asked, "Why?". That single question cracked something open. Suddenly, drugs were no longer the headline; pressure, pain, and survival were. Education, in that moment, did not judge. It listened. We learned how to defend dignity, physically, legally, and emotionally. We learned what to do when it is threatened, how to protect ourselves and others, and how to act instead of freeze. These were not academic lessons. They were tools for a world that does not always play fair. Near the end of the camp, chess appeared, almost casually, disguised as a fun competition. What began as a game slowly unfolded into a lesson. We were encouraged to play, to compete, to enjoy it, but also to think. Each move demanded patience. Every decision carried a consequence that could not be taken back. It was no longer just about winning, but about understanding that rushing the present often sabotages the future. When the competition ended, the strongest players were rewarded with mini chessboards. Receiving my first chessboard felt symbolic, a small object carrying a quiet reminder that life, like chess, rewards those who think beyond their next move. By the end of the camp, something had shifted. My idea of masculinity no longer revolved around strength or silence, but awareness. Education, I realised, is what teaches us how not to become what the world fears we already are. In times of unrest, education is not a luxury; it is a stabiliser; a compass. As Steve Sinnott called it, ‘the great liberator.’ And for a group of boys who were once searched at a gate, it became the reason we walked out trusted, not by authority, but by ourselves. BY JOENTY NGOMA CULTURAL HIGH SCHOOL SOUTH AFRICA (GRADE 11) 

Shaping Education Through the Lens of Identity

By Shahnaz Akhter • April 22, 2026
On a recent trip to Pakistan, I was struck by two contrasting images. In one, school children moved through the chaos of Rawalpindi’s streets, their journey interrupted by traffic, by cows being walked through the road, by the everyday disorder of the city. In another, young children carried heavy bags for street vendors who give them employment; their labour, part of the same urban rhythm but pointing to very different futures. Access to education, as is often referenced in this magazine, is not universal. I reference Pakistan not only because of these scenes, but because it is closely linked to my heritage and identity. Reflecting on what education means, and how I interact with it, has been central to my academic journey. Coming from a family where my parents were not formally educated, education has provided me with opportunities that were not previously available to them. This experience shaped my decision to work in widening participation in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. One of the projects we developed was the Colonial Hangover Project, designed to explore the everyday legacies of colonialism. The project aimed not only to give school-aged students the confidence to speak back to a curriculum that often remains silent on their histories, but also to create opportunities for experiences they might otherwise not have access to because of their backgrounds. It was through the Colonial Hangover Project that we enabled students to speak at the Colonial Legacies conference held at Coventry Cathedral. Students from across Coventry spoke about their heritage, produced art, and sang gospel songs reflecting their experiences as young people whose families are linked to British history through empire. They spoke about local histories, including the grave of enslaved child Myrtilla, about South Asian heritage, and about the ways colonial hierarchies have shaped relationships between communities, including the persistence of anti-Blackness within some South Asian communities. Over 400 students came together during the day to celebrate their heritage and to speak within the cathedral. Building on this momentum, the work sparked a wider ambition: to ensure that all schools, particularly those in areas of high deprivation such as Coventry, could access sustained opportunities rather than one-off interventions. This led to a drive to connect schools to the UNESCO ASPnet Schools Network, widening access to global learning while embedding students within an international community committed to peace, cultural understanding, and social justice. For a city shaped by postindustrial decline and uneven educational outcomes, this connection mattered. It enabled students to see their local experiences as part of a wider global story. Alongside this, we drew on the Hidden Heroes campaign led by Preet Gill and Tom Tugendhat, encouraging students to identify and celebrate their own heroes within their families and communities. This created pathways for young people to speak in the UK Parliament, bringing together local heritage, global networks, and civic voice. Together, these strands reflected a shared commitment: widening participation not only in education, but in belonging and representation. BY SHAHNAZ AKHTER Associate Director is based in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, where she works in widening participation and outreach. Her work focuses on creating meaningful pathways for school-aged students from underrepresented backgrounds to engage with higher education, civic life, and global learning.