Child Friendly School (CFS)

Child Friendly School (CFS)

What is Child Friendly School?

School is a place for education of lower grade, usually below a college and university

The school is a significant personal and social place in the lives of its students. A child-friendly school ensures every child an environment that is physically safe, emotionally secure and psychologically fit.              

                                                                                                 Teachers are the single most important factor in creating an effective and inclusive classroom.

 Children are natural learners, but this capacity to learn can be undermined and sometimes destroyed. A child-friendly school recognizes, encourages and supports children's growing capacities as learners by providing a school culture, teaching behaviours and curriculum content that are focused on learning and the learner. The ability of a school to be and to call itself child-friendly is directly linked to the support, participation and collaboration it receives from families.

Child-friendly schools aim to develop a learning environment in which children are motivated and able to learn. Staff members are friendly and welcoming to children and attend to all their health and safety needs.

Basic Characteristic of a Child Friendly School:

·         It is a child-seeking ---actively identifying excluded children to get them enrolled in school and include in learning, treating children as subjects with rights and state as duty – bearers with obligations to fulfill these rights, and demonstrating, promoting and helping to monitor the rights and well-being of all children in the community.

·         It is child-centered school---acting in the best interests of the child, leading to the realization of the child’s full potential and concerned both about the “whole” child )including health, nutritional status, and well-being ) and about what happens to children—in their families and communities –before they enter school and after they leave it. Above all, a rights-based, child-friendly school must reflect an environment of good quality chararcterized  by several essential aspects.

Tips to Make your School Child Friendly:     

·        Children with disabilities sometimes find it difficult to get to school. Try to organize transportation to school and make school accessible.

·        When a child with a disability first comes to your school, talk with the family member who is with the child and ask about any problems and difficulties that the child may have.

·        Promote peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity, physical and mental health and well being.

·        Build learning environments and processes that allow children to develop the knowledge and skills they will need in life.

·        Children must be encouraged to actively participate in making important decisions that effect their lives in school and community.

·        Take care of child’s social, emotional, physical and psychological needs

·         Be helpful and positive towars learners

·         Guide learners towards their personal strengths while pointing out their areas for development very carefully

·         Introduce learning from easy to difficult

·         Remember everyone learns in different ways.

·         Don’t expect from all students to react in the same way.