Strengthening children’s rights

The Human Rights Act 1998 directly incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into UK domestic law. In practice, the ECHR covers the same rights as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). However, in most cases, there is no similar incorporation of other international human rights treaties into UK law. This means the rights they cover are not directly enforceable through domestic courts.

Of all such treaties, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is widely regarded as the one that would do the most good in strengthening domestic human rights by direct incorporation. This has been specifically recommended by the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Children’s Commissioners for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, as well as being a step that has already been taken by many other countries.

In 2024, Scotland became the first part of the UK to incorporate the Convention. In 2014, Wales passed a law requiring ministers to have regard to the UNCRC when exercising their functions.

In depth

Children’s rights are particularly relevant to our work as there is often a clash between religious discrimination against children by the state and children’s rights. Problems relating to state-funded religious schools (e.g. religiously selective admissions) often highlight such clashes, as does the fact that children do not have their own say over opting out from certain curricular areas (specifically religious education, sex education, and collective worship). Instead, these rights predominantly rest with parents, in some cases even when children and young people are sufficiently mature and intelligent enough to make their own fully informed decisions on these matters.

Collective worship

To illustrate, since 2006, sixth-form pupils in England and Wales have had the legal right to withdraw themselves from collective worship irrespective of their parents’ wishes. No such right exists in domestic law in Northern Ireland, where pupils up to the age of 18 can be compelled to participate in school worship, which has an exclusively Christian character. While the changes to the law concerning sixth-formers were a step in the right direction, the current position on collective worship across the UK largely ignores the fact that, under the Human Rights Act 1998 and Article 14 of the UNCRC, younger children also have the right to freedom of religion or belief; a right that is not respected when religious worship is imposed upon them. In Scotland, the government has proposed a law that would reform the opt-out system for religious worship in schools, but stops short of giving competent school pupils the right to opt out. This ignores the advice of the Children’s Commissioner and the UN, and will leave non-religious pupils without the option to withdraw from worship against their parents’ wishes. Further, although there is a parental right to withdraw from religious education (RE), pupils may not withdraw themselves from the subject at any age.

By only allowing children to opt out of collective worship at 16, UK law also fails to enable children to fully realise their ‘Gillick competence’ rights in a manner ‘consistent with’ their ‘evolving capacities’, as established in European case law and reflected in Article 12 (respect for the views of the child) and Article 14 (freedom of thought, conscience and religion) of the UNCRC. This is something we raised with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child during their 2023 review of children’s rights in the UK and which motivated their recommendation to extend the right to withdraw to younger children in their final report. In response to the Scottish Government’s proposed changes to religious observance, which will allow a child who has been withdrawn from religious observance to opt back in (but not to opt out themselves), the Children and Young People’s Commissioner for Scotland recommended that ‘Children should be able to independently exercise a legal right to withdraw from religious observance.’

Relationships and sex education

A further area of the curriculum that is central to the realisation of children’s rights is relationships and sex education (RSE). All the best evidence shows that good RSE ensures young people grow up healthier, happier, and more able to make informed decisions about sex and relationships. The subject also plays an important safeguarding role which brings it into line with Article 19 of the UNCRC which requires that ‘States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child’.

With this in mind, we welcomed the introduction of compulsory RSE, with no parental right to withdraw in Wales in 2022. Although the UK Government also introduced compulsory RSE for schools in England in 2020, it retained the parental right to withdraw from sex education (but not relationships or health education) up until three terms from a pupil’s 16th birthday. After this point, the pupil has the right to opt back in. In Northern Ireland, there is no official right to withdraw, but, in practice, parents are allowed to remove their children from these lessons at any stage.

In our view, leaving the option to receive sex education so late exacerbates the risk that pupils will suffer harms (including the potential contraction of STIs, teenage pregnancy, sexual exploitation, and abuse) before they are equipped to understand these issues or know how and when to seek advice. This not only undermines their rights, but also (potentially) the rights of those around them. For this reason, we believe the parental right to withdraw should be removed and all children should receive comprehensive, age-appropriate RSE across the key stages. However, to safeguard the freedom of religion or belief of children, this can only happen if faith-based carve-outs allowing religious schools to teach RSE in line with their faith beliefs are removed, and the subject is taught in an objective, critical and pluralistic way – as it now is in Wales.

Physical punishment

We don’t believe that physical punishment of children is reasonable or appropriate, and have celebrated changes in the law to ban this. Scotland has banned corporal punishment for 5 years, Ireland for 10 years. Wales banned it in 2022. These countries join most countries in Europe in banning physical punishment of children. England and Northern Ireland, however, remain outliers.

In 2025 we joined a coalition of children’s and medical organisations, including the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and the British Medical Association, to call for a change in the law to ban the hitting of children in England through the repeal the reasonable punishment defence. This was also backed by all four Children’s Commissioners. Despite the fact that most parents think physical punishment of children is unacceptable, the UK Government said it wanted to look at the evidence from Wales before making a decision.

In light of this, the campaign group brought back a different amendment at Report Stage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which would have required Ministers to respond to Wales’s three-year post-implementation review of the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Act 2020 before Parliament within six months, and consider the implications for England. Unfortunately this wasn’t accepted by the UK Government.

Children’s rights overall

Recent years have seen considerable progress on children’s rights laws in the UK. In 2014, both the Welsh and Scottish parliaments passed laws requiring ministers to have regard to the UNCRC when exercising their functions, while a 2014 UK law requires the Children’s Commissioner for England to have regard to and monitor the implementation of the UNCRC. In light of the new law in Wales, in 2020 the Welsh Government was finally able to abolish the legal defence of ‘reasonable punishment’, banning all forms of physical violence by adults against children. A similar law passed in Scotland in 2019. The Curriculum Assessment (Wales) Act 2021 made the promotion of knowledge and understanding about children’s rights mandatory for Welsh schools.

In 2024, Scotland fully incorporated the UNCRC, a huge milestone that our sister charity Humanist Society Scotland worked on, and a historic first. But none of the laws elsewhere in the UK or Crown Dependencies go far enough as they do not ensure that the rights contained within the Convention are directly enforceable.

What we’re doing

  • We have been part of several coalitions of children’s charities and other bodies who have put forward amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would strengthen children’s rights. We supported amendments to change the law on hitting children in England, and to review the ban in Wales, and amendments to introduce child rights’ impact assessments as part of decision-making.

  • We are a member of the Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE), a coalition of charities and children’s rights activists that calls on the UK Government to make the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) part of UK law. We also work with similar groups in Wales and Northern Ireland. Working within these coalitions, we hope to be able to promote the importance and legitimacy of the human rights of all young people in the UK, whatever their circumstances. We also regularly feed in to CRAE’s annual State of Children’s Rights Report, as well as international reports such as the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s Concluding Observations.

  • We are part of a coalition of children’s charities, Children’s Commissioners, and others calling for the abolition of the ‘reasonable punishment defence’, a defence which allows corporal punishment to be applied to children. We are supporting an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that would ban the hitting of children in England and we were actively involved in the ban that was introduced in Wales in 2022.

  • We work to strengthen citizenship education and in particular its role in educating children about their human rights. In England, as part of the ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review, we called for citizenship education to be maintained within the National Curriculum and also for it to be a statutory element from primary school onwards, and welcomed the Review’s recommendation for this to be implemented. We think that UNICEF’s Rights Respecting Schools Award should be examined to see how it can best be mirrored in the curriculum proper.

  • We have a good working relationship with officials in the UK and Welsh Departments for Education (DfE) and regularly respond to relevant Government consultations and provide briefings on children’s rights issues relating to our policy remit.

  • We support parents and pupils experiencing issues with securing their freedom of religion and belief at school, both through our parents’ guides for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland and by giving bespoke advice where this is necessary.

Appendix: Past work on this issue

Page last reviewed: 10 February 2026