Bereavement Support and Grief Education in Schools: A Child Rights Obligation

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is international law that sets out rights of under 18-year-olds in relation to protections, provisions and participation. The NI Government has a duty to ensure these rights are realised in law, policy and practice. However, not all children have access to bereavement support in school and grief education is not mandatory. This is despite most children experiencing the death of someone close to them by the time they leave school.

Objectives:

To consider a School Bereavement Programme from a rights-based perspective and reflect on the wider value of using a rights framework when designing and describing public health approaches.

Methods:

A desk-based exercise was conducted to consider which Rights are engaged through a pilot School Bereavement Programme which has been developed for and with children and young people, and which aims to build competency in teachers and grief literacy in children through the delivery of teacher bereavement training and a teacher-led lesson plan.

Results:

The pilot programme engages a number of Articles of the UNCRC in its design, delivery and evaluation. Children’s voice (Article 12) and best interests (Article 3) are a central focus in its oversight, planning and monitoring. The outputs from the programme are designed to be age and developmentally appropriate (Article 2, 6). And the anticipated impact is for it to ensure that health and wellbeing (Article 24) and child-centred and empowering education (Article 28, 29) are given equal importance by Government and Schools.

Conclusions:

Applying a children’s rights perspective to bereavement support interventions in schools and grief education provision provides an alternative way of demonstrating the holistic benefits such public health approaches offer and highlights the obligations on Government to address unmet need and through such actions realise children’s fundamental rights.