Is your school child-friendly? This is how it can be one:

• ‘Spare the rod and save childhood’ should be the slogan and message for children, their parents and community at large.
• A school must have a trained counsellor to help children showing signs of psychological and emotional problems and to provide necessary counseling to both the children and their parents/guardians.
• A school must have a social worker to generate positive peer response, family response and community response.
• Regular and periodic PTAs should become an essential feature. PTAs should provide a platform for dialogue between teachers and parents on the child’s overall development and not just progress in class.
• Training and sensitization activities with teachers on child rights must become a regular feature just as teachers are sent for academic trainings by various schools on a regular basis.
• Fora for children’s participation in matters affecting them inside the school should be created.
• Sex Education should be made an essential component of life skill education imparted in schools.
• Basic facilities like toilets and drinking water for children must be made available within the school premises. Toilets for boys and girls should be separate.
• For schools that function from a tent or a small room, adequate breaks for toilet and drinking water must form a routine.
• Disabled-friendly infrastructure and teaching-learning materials reflect on a school’s sensitivity towards the disabled children. Ensure that you have it all or at least what your resources can best permit. Local resources can be mobilized to fulfill this need.
• There should be no vendors in and around the school premises.
• Schools that strictly discourage employment of children for domestic work by its teachers actually establish a best practice to be followed by all in the community.
• Evolving peer groups to check drug abuse or any other form of abuse taking place within the school premise is a good practice that schools must adopt.
• Guidelines are set up and followed for disciplinary enquiries and action against teachers or other school karamcharis reportedly involved in child sexual abuse within the school premises or outside.
• Guidelines, rules and norms are laid out to deal with discrimination on grounds of gender, disability, caste, religion or HIV/AIDS reported within the school premises.
• Schools should set up a child protection monitoring unit or cell involving children, their parents, and panchayats / municipal councils. The role of this unit could be to maintain records of children needing care and protection and to report cases of child abuse to the police or other concerned authorities.