Saturday, 4 June 2016

WE Free The Children

We are very excited and looking forward to welcoming Free the Children to Sciennes on Wednesday 15th June to embrace the pupil leadership opportunities their programme provides for taking action.

Free the Children

Free The Children is an international charity and educational partner that believes in a world where all young people are free to achieve their fullest potential as change-makers. Over the last 20 years, Free The Children has grown into an international movement supporting youth empowerment through educational service-learning initiatives in North America and the United Kingdom, and a holistic and sustainable international development model. It is supported by the Queen's Trust, the UN, Virgin Atlantic and has many international supporters -  Malala, Desmond Tutu, Prince Harry, Oprah will give a flavour. Their model is 'children helping children' and they promote pupil leadership and taking action, here and abroad. The scheme began in Canada, initiated  by one of the CEOs when he was 12, and is a social enterprise endeavour. 

For more information about Free the Children, visit their website.

The 'Free the Children' programme will fit extremely well with our well established Junior Awards Scheme Scotland (JASS) programme in P6 and P7 where pupils are asked to take their own action to achieve a 'Me and My World' element. JASS is a children's version of The Duke of Edinburgh Award, and the idea for it actually came from Sciennes! It is now adopted throughout Edinburgh and beyond so has been retitled Junior Award Scheme for Schools.

The Junior Award Scheme Schools (JASS) is an accredited learning programme, celebrating wider achievement, for young people (P6-S2). Sciennes and Tollcross Primary Schools have been implementing this scheme since we piloted it in 2009.
The concept emerged from a discussion during a Sciennes P7 visit to Lagganlia between Alice Brown, Gael Logan and Barry Hewitt who came up with the idea to set up a 'Duke of Edinburgh' style award scheme for upper primary pupils. The scheme has since been developed into a city wide programme.

There are three levels (bronze, silver and gold), each requiring a higher degree of commitment. Each level also includes four sections to be completed:
  • My interest - a hobby or interest
  • Get Active, Stay Active - involvement in a sport or physical activity
  • Me and My World - a community or environmental project
  • Adventure - a teamwork challenge through involvement in an outdoor activity (e.g Benmore and Lagganlia)
http://jassawardsciennes.blogspot.co.uk/

Sciennes helped develop an online version - eJASS.


Free the Children will also fit in well with our Unicef Rights Respecting Schools programme. We have recently achieved Level One and our next steps are to continue to extend knowledge of UNCRC and to expand global citizenship. The Free the Children programme will assist us with that. We have highlighted the relevance of the Global Goals for Sustainable Development since their launch in September and the programme also supports that well.

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