Children and young people from across the city gathered with Aberdeen City councillors at NESCol yesterday (Wednesday 16 November) to showcase their work ahead of World Children’s Day.
World Children’s Day marks the anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and this year falls on Sunday (20 November).
It is also Unicef’s annual day of action ‘for children, by children’ and is the ideal opportunity for Aberdeen City Council to demonstrate its ongoing commitment to involving children and young people in decision making and co-designing the future of the city.
The theme of World Children’s Day this year is “Inclusion for Every Child” and pupils at today’s event highlighted their involvement in helping make a better future for Aberdeen through the City Centre and Beach Masterplan and the Pupils’ Climate Change Working Group.
In 2021, Creative Learning, in partnership with Streets-UK, began consulting P6/7 pupils across eight schools located in the city centre and beach localities In order to ensure children and young people continue to be actively engaged in the development and delivery of the Council’s City Centre and Beach Masterplans.
The pupils have taken part in creative activities to help identify the themes that are important to them and how all types of play can become central to the designs of open spaces within the Masterplan. In addition, theatre workshops have been run for secondary school pupils through the Summer in the City and Autumn in the City programmes to explore their views and feelings about the proposals and the films shown today capture that process.
The Pupils’ Climate Change Working Group was established in March this year with a £150,000 budget provided by the Council and work on the topic was also highlighted today by Bucksburn Academy’s S1 pupils who are taking on one of the most important questions facing us today through an innovative interdisciplinary project.
The school is one of two in the North-East working on the project supported by the ScotPEN Wellcome Engagement Award through the University of Aberdeen’s Food and Climate Change project.
All S1 pupils at Bucksburn Academy undertake two lessons each week of Interdisciplinary Learning. In this class, the pupils develop a range of skills and use knowledge from across the curriculum to answer big questions around climate and sustainability.
Pupils have undertaken research on how our food choices can affect the planet and how eating locally grown food can make a big difference to reducing our carbon footprint. They have put their findings into action, with pupils growing their own food in the school grounds and learning about locally sourced food.
Among the participants at today’s event were Education and Children’s Services Convener, Councillor Martin Greig, who said: “World Children’s Day is an important event for us here in the city. It is reassuring to be a part of this international movement promoting the wellbeing and rights of young people in our area and around the world.
“We have to encourage and support the new generation as much help as possible. Their positive attitude gives us all hope and our young people are clearly enthusiastic about taking part in shaping the future of our world together.
“It is great to see their strong commitment through so many school projects. They have shown a real belief in teamwork such as the Climate Change Working Group. It is good to celebrate their activities.”
Aberdeen is currently working towards becoming a Unicef Child Friendly City with a significant number of our schools already engaged in Unicef’s Rights Respecting Schools Award.
More information on World Children’s Day can be found at:
https://www.un.org/en/observances/world-childrens-day
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