A Significant Events Approach to Children’s Rights with children under three in early childhood education and care

Abstract

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is one of the most widely-ratified human rights treaties, yet the visibility of children in the early years, in the mandatory government reports to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and in the Committee’s concluding observations to States Parties, is relatively low (Lundy, 2020, “Implementing the Rights of Young Children: An Assessment of the Impact of General Comment No. 7 on Law and Policy on a Global Scale,” In Routledge International Handbook of Young Children’s Rights, edited by J. Murray, B. B. Swadener, and K. Smith, 15–29, London: Routledge). This paper sets out an innovative approach to record and analyse rights-based practice with young children, which focuses on significant events in a child’s daily life that could help raise the visibility of children in the early years as rights holders. The analysis of 75 h of participant observations across two settings in England and two in Finland, involving 16 two-year-old children, revealed that there were five rights that cut across the two countries and related to all children. The study found that having a way of recording rights-based practice is important if we wish to support all children, in learning about, experiencing, and exercising their rights, so that they can have an impact on pedagogical practice and thus influence their own lives in ECEC.