ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses suggestions made by teachers working in primary schools across the UK for reforms that may lead to better practice in human rights education (HRE) provision. These teachers advised that an initiative on national values, such as fundamental British values, may offer a vehicle for teaching about human rights, or that a comparable free-standing obligation for HRE would be advantageous. A number of broad practical obstacles to HRE delivery were also identified by teachers in the surveys and discussed in the interviews. Indeed, the reported paucity of holistic HRE globally indicates that the barriers to its implementation, both attitudinal and practical, revealed through this project are likely to be extensive. Teachers’ interpretation of HRE as relating exclusively to the values considered to be at its core means that learners are unlikely to be equipped with human rights language or the broader understanding of rights as a universal framework.
