First Children's Rights Scheme: child friendly version

10. Children and young people’s views on actions in the Scheme

Children and young people said that the Scottish Government should:

• Talk to children and young people about how they are experiencing their rights.
• Make sure that children and young people are given information that they can understand.
• Help everyone to know about and understand children’s rights. This includes children and young people, parents and carers and the people who work in public authorities and the Scottish Government.
• Support children and young people to complain if they think that their rights are not being respected.

Here are some of the things that the children and young people said:

“Scottish Government should speak directly to children and ask them if their rights are being protected.”

“Make sure the people of the organisations understand what the rights ACTUALLY mean.”

“Parents need to know [about children’s rights] too.”

“Advertise how to raise complaints and how to get support and link child-friendly information to schools’ websites and Young Scot’s website.”

We listened carefully to what the children and young people told us and made sure that the Scheme includes actions to:

• help raise awareness of children’s rights;
• support children and young people to participate in decisions that affect them and to help children to give their views in ways that are best for them; and
• help children and young people to complain if they think that their rights are not being respected.

We have also made sure that the Scheme talks about ‘children and young people’ rather than ‘children’ as this is what children and young people told us they would prefer.

Every year, we will write a child-friendly report about all of our work to deliver the actions in the Scheme.