Introduction

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood s/he lives in; the school or college s/he attends; the factory, farm, or office where s/he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination”. Eleanor Roosevelt

"We need to recognise that a first-class education is no longer a luxury. In our age, it is a fundamental civil right and necessity". Rupert Murdoch

The human rights revolution, as has unfolded over many decades and founded on centuries of people's aspirations and struggles, is partly a powerful revolution of rising expectations.

It provides a vision of education and a better society that can be real and meaningful to people today. It involves "small places" such as schools, colleges and universities. And never has it been a more propitious time to be a human rights advocate and activist.

This paper discusses a rights-based approach to education by:

• Examining the meaning and value of a rights-based approach
• Introducing a coherent framework for a rights-based approach.

A coherent framework may embody the following four rights:

1. The right to empowered participation and accountability
2. The right to a high-quality, equal and inclusive education
3. The right to a holistic approach to improving education
4. The right to a well-resourced public education system.

These ‘4 Rs’ are aspirations against which current realities can be compared in order to pinpoint areas for change and improvement.

What is the right to education?

Human rights include civil and political rights such as the right to vote, free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from discrimination, freedom of worship and the right to a fair hearing.

There may not be the same level of awareness, however, of social, economic and cultural rights such as high-quality education and health care. The right to education is thus a mix of both social, economic and cultural rights and civil and political rights.

Like all human rights, the right to education is universal and inalienable. Every child, young person and adult has the right to a high-quality education that is inclusive and non-discriminatory and promotes his or her right to dignity and optimum development.

Besides focusing on students, parents and educators as rights-holders, a rights-based approach to education also emphasises governments’ obligations to respect, protect and fulfill these rights.

Background

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent treaties have established the right to education and have the force of law for governments that ratify them.

Having already been referred to by the International Labour Organisation in the 1920s, the right obviously has its origins in the aspirations and struggles of educators, ordinary working people and progressive legislators throughout history.

In recent decades, the Education For All movement led by UNESCO, aiming to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015 and reflecting renewed interest in educational outcomes and quality, has created new momentum for education as a right.

What has to change?

Protections of human rights in all countries, including Australia, can be ad hoc at best and, further, many fundamental rights may be far from being fully realised, including in areas such as education.

As the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Catherine Branson QC, has observed:

"My experiences as a judge left me persuaded ... that in Australia we have legislatures that are insufficiently rights-conscious and bureaucracies that are insufficiently rights-sensitive. I don’t mean to suggest that our government is on a mission to breach human rights principles. But I most certainly mean to suggest that, currently, human rights is hardly a flicker in the eye of most law-makers and decision-makers. That has to change".

Building momentum - what can be done?

The right to education is not close to being realised anywhere.

In Australia, with the 2006 Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, Victoria became the first Australian state to provide for formal protection of civil and political human rights. But this does not extend to social rights such as the right to education.

While most countries have signed up to international conventions, the on-going challenge is to provide the national legislation, policy, resources and support to fully realise all human rights in practice.

As the leading UN expert on education as a right, Katarina Tomasevski, observed, “the paradox of human rights is the double role of the state, as protector and violater”.

What can be done, then, to build momentum for education as a right? An effective rights-based strategy (E) must have:

• A strong rationale (R) for adopting a rights-based approach
• A clear vision and coherent framework (F) for human rights
• An action plan and partnerships (P) for achieving the vision.

In short, R + F + P = E. Each is discussed in what follows.

Rationale for a rights-based approach

The rationale for a rights-based approach is twofold:

1. The relationship between citizens as rights-holders with claims and governments obligated to respect, protect and fulfill these rights gives impetus to educational improvement
2. Linking togther a rnage of rights, it specifically provides a powerful, truly comprehensive vision of public education that can be real and meaningful to people today.

On a practical level, it enables both of these things by:

• Promoting schools, communities and a society in which citizens are fully aware of, and strongly assert, their rights
• Ensuring that governments and education systems have clear obligations for rights that are entitlements, not just policy promises or choices that can be made by consumers.

Asserting rights

For many more people (including students) to become aware of, and assert, their rights, it is neccessary to:

• Promote the principle that people are bearers of universal and inalienable rights, not just consumers buying services
• Name issues such as the achievement gap in education for what they really are: serious violations of human rights
• Highlight the right of parents, students, communities and educators to participate in decision making, including the macro level policy decision making of education departments.

Government obligations

Alongside the power of people to assert their rights, governments are more likely to consistently respect, protect and fulfill rights if:

• There are steps toward more transparent, accountable relations between governments, communities and citizens
• There is pressure on governments to ensure a free, high-quality public education and its ‘progressive realisation’ at all levels
• Necessary changes in legislation, policy and funding (to fully support the right to education) are indentified and implemented.

As it is the federal government that enters into international agreements to protect human rights, it has the overall legal responsibility for making sure that rights are protected.

A rights-based framework

A weakness of a human rights approach is the lack of a coherent framework. Such a framework can be a tool for measuring the realisation of rights and the glue for building strong partnerships.

A coherent framework may embody four basic, interlinked rights:

1. The right to empowered participation and accountability
2. The right to a high-quality, equal and inclusive education
3. The right to a holistic approach to improving education
4. The right to a well-resourced public education system.

A rights-based education necessitates the realisation of all four. Each of these ‘4 Rs’ is discussed in what follows.

1. participation and accountability

A rights-based approach to education pivots on participation. According to the UN Declaration on the Right to Development, participation must be “active, free and meaningful”.

This is not confined to decision-making at the local level. It also extends to decision making forums that affect policy making at the state-wide, national and international levels.

Participation challenges the top-down model of educators as mere implementers of policy delivery, a model which is not supported by any serious research although governments still try to use it.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights suggests that governments are obliged to facilitate participation by relevant groups at all stages of the policy process - from initial conception through to implementation and evaluation.

Informed and empowered participation

According to the US Center for Economic and Social Rights, this means that governments should:

• Facilitate participation in the full range of educational decision-making, including management and evaluation of the education system, budgets and financing, curricula and teaching methods
• Ensure adequate access for all stakeholders across communities to mechanisms for participation
• Guarantee transparency in and access to all relevant information about the education system
• Ensure that people have the capacity for informed participation.

What matters, therefore, is that participation is empowering.

Empowerment is the process by which people’s capabilities to assert their human rights grow, thus claiming their rights rather than simply waiting for policies and legislation to change.

Human rights education

Pertinent to empowered participation is education in human rights.

This is in itself a fundamental human right and also a responsibility. The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights exhorts "every individual and every organ of society" to "strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms".

Human rights education includes learning the skills of advocacy - to speak and act every day in the name of human rights. It also provides a basis for conflict resolution and consensus building.

Education for human rights empowers people - including students - through skills to take appropriate action.

Students' right to participate

Several provisions in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) reflect children's right to participation. Article 12 affirms that:

“States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child”.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child urges governments to encourage greater participation by children in schools.

Participation includes relationships in the classroom but may also extend to students’ participation in the development of school and government educational policy.

Student voice and classroom talk

Student voice is at the core of empowered participation.

But this depends on the extent to which schools aim to ensure that all students, regardless of social background, acquire a highly-developed capacity to speak clearly, publicly, competently and confidently, and at length, about key themes and topics.

The pedagogy of the spoken word exploits the strong association between oracy (oral skills), literacy and numeracy.

The benefits are twofold: it provides possibilities for significantly improving outcomes for all students as well as enabling many more students to participate in school and other decision making.

Schools have not always been able to ensure that sustained opportunites to develop student voice are embedded in their everyday learning.

Accountability

A rights-based approach can improve accountability by identifying rights holders and duty bearers and monitoring the work of duty bearers in meeting their obligations.

These include positive obligations to protect, promote and fulfil rights and negative obligations to abstain from rights violations.

Monitoring should be regular and include feedback or complaint mechanisms to acknowledge stakeholders as rights-holders.

2. Quality, equality and inclusion 

The World Education Forum Dakar Framework for Action (2000) highlights the issue of quality by stating the need to improve “all aspects of the quality of education”.

The Education For All movement, which aims to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015, is also increasingly concerned with linking quality and inclusive education.

But the missing link is pedagogy. As Robin Alexander notes:

“Quality is a recent arrival in [the Education For All] discourse, and pedagogy is only just beginning to be recognised as central to a proper account of what educational quality entails”.

What will serve to drive, therefore, the global educational agenda wil be a deeper understanding of the links between:

• The quality of education
• An equal and inclusive education
• Developments in pedagogy.

Non-discrimination

Quality obviously does not necessarily mean inclusive - if students from the most advantaged backgrounds receive a ‘quality’ education while many other students ‘miss out’.

The UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960) noted that discrimination includes any distinction, exclusion, limitation or preference which, being based on race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, economic condition or birth, has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing equality of treatment in education and in particular:

• Of depriving any person or group of persons of access to education of any type or at any level
• Of limiting any person or group of persons to education of an inferior standard
• Of establishing or maintaining separate educational systems or institutions ... (although such systems are permitted for pupils of the two sexes, for religious or linguistic reasons, and private education is also permitted if its object is not to secure the exclusion of any group).

Disaggregated data

Disaggregated data can provide information to guide policy and practice in relation to a rights-based approach to education.

To ensure the visibility of all groups of students and their rights in relation to not only access to (but also the quality of) education, it will be crucial that data are increasingly disaggregated by sex, disability, race, ethnic or social origin, economic status, religion, language, geographic location and other status.

Overly generic data can obviously disguise hidden pockets of inequality and render discrimination and exclusion invisible.

Rights-holders are yet to have routine access to sufficiently disaggregated data on patterns of enrolment, attendance, completion and attainment of children in the education system.

Inclusive education – key challenges

The UNESCO publication Policy Guidelines on Inclusion in Education (2009) notes that:

“Looking at education through an inclusive lens implies a shift from seeing the child as the problem to seeing the education system as the problem”.

Likewise, during preparations for the 48th International Conference on Education on Inclusive Education: the Way of the Future (2008), discussions noted that:

• The term inclusive education needs to be further clarified and adopted by educators, governmental and non-governmental organizations, policy-makers and social actors
• The lack of understanding, awareness and support in society about inclusive education needs to be addressed through advocacy and dialogue at regional and national levels.

In discussing an inclusive curriculum, it was also noted that:

• Cohesive transition and articulation of the curriculum between early childhood, primary and secondary education are key factors in preventing dropping out and ensuring retention
• Opportunities for informal and non-formal education should be developed in the curriculum
• A highly academic, heavily overloaded curriculum is counterproductive to inclusive education
• Multiple stakeholders should be encouraged to participate in curriculum design.

Teacher and community education for inclusion

Other discussions around inclusive education suggested that:

• Teacher-education programs (both pre-service and in-service) should be reoriented and aligned to inclusive education approaches in order to give teachers the pedagogical capacities necessary to make diversity work in the classroom
• Training of all education professionals, including members of the community, are essential to supporting an inclusive school.

3. Holistic approach to improvement

A holistic approach to improving education reflects the fact that human rights are universal, indivisible, and interdependent.

This means that there is no hierarchy of rights; all rights are equally important and the realisation of one particular right depends in whole or in part on the realisation of others.

The lack of a holistic approach to educational improvement partly accounts for the lack of success with reforms that are still more piecemeal than systemic.

Whole-of-education links

A holistic approach also acknowledges the importance of the links between early childhood care and education as well as primary and secondary schooling. As UNESCO argued long ago:

“The terms ‘primary schooling’ and ‘secondary schooling’ are coming more and more to be considered as no longer referring to different entities, but rather to successive phases of a continuing process that cannot be sharply distinguished except arbitrarily and by doing violence to the real continuity of growth and education. In so far as school systems and scholastic methods do break the continuity of growth they are coming to be regarded as imperfect instruments of education” (1961).

What kind of system?

Importantly, a holistic approach nudges educational improvement away from ‘incrementalism’ to the question of ‘What kind of system do we want?’

In this regard, in the World Declaration on Education for All, it is affirmed that:

“To serve the basic learning needs of all requires more than a recommitment to basic education as it now exists. What is needed is an "expanded vision" that surpasses present resource levels, institutional structures, curricula, and conventional delivery systems while building on the best in current practices”.

A Human Rights-Based Approach to Education for All (UNESCO, 2007) also states that:

“In the long run, the most disadvantaged are clearly best served by a non-discriminating and fully inclusive education system. Overall, therefore, investment needs to be made in programmes that have the potential to achieve large-scale systemic change”.

4. Well-resourced public education

Resources and facilities are unfairly distributed in many education systems and across schools.

Government revenue and spending can obviously be a key factor in realising human rights.

Increased spending on public education challenges, however, the political orthodoxy that taxes should not be increased.

Scarce resources also lead to trade-offs such as decisions to invest more in secondary than primary education. But it is obviously not acceptable to discriminate between groups of students and offer preferential treatment to some on the basis of resources.

This includes the question of fees. Human rights law affirms that education cannot be ultimately universalised unless it is free.

Fees for university study are contrary to the intent of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This affirmed that access to higher education should be secured through the “progressive realisation” of free education.

Realistically, of course, it is not possible for all governments to ensure the right to education for all at all levels immediately.

Further, the progressive introduction of free secondary and higher education is mentioned in some UN documents but not others.

A plan for phasing out fees

However, the principle of progressive realisation may require governments to have a clear strategy, plan and time frame for enabling universal access to primary and secondary education.

Over time, post-compulsory education may thus also be made progressively available and accessible.

Experience in many countries shows that the abolition of fees creates significant increases in enrolment and improves equitable outcomes and opportunities for students of diverse backgrounds. 

Conclusion

It is suggested that a weakness of a human rights approach is the lack of a coherent framework.

Such a framework can be a tool for measuring the realisation of rights and the glue for building strong partnerships for change.

It is also proposed that a coherent framework may embody four basic, interlinked rights:

1. The right to empowered participation and accountability
2. The right to a high-quality, equal and inclusive education
3. The right to a holistic approach to improving education
4. The right to a well-resourced public education system.

To do this may require a Charter of Education Rights for students, parents, teachers, principals and other stakeholders to build a shared understanding of, and together advance, these rights.

Working together to realise these rights can serve to build better education systems and schools and achieve the best possible educational outcomes for all.