ECRU members regularly provide training to front line practitioners and undertake consultancies for local, national and international organisations on specific children’s rights issues. Below are some examples of our training.
Helen Stalford and Sarah Woodhouse
ECRU, in collaboration with Liverpool Law Clinic, have developed a comprehensive online training tool to enable lawyers to work more effectively on children’s cases. The training is based on in-depth observation of lawyers working on a range of children’s cases relating to immigration, asylum, criminal justice, child protection and parental separation. It is also informed by children’s accounts of their own experiences of going through legal proceedings.
The project was funded by the European Commission and involved working in partnership with a range of civil society organisations and lawyers, including Save the Children, JustforKids Law, Coram Children’s Legal Centre, and the Project for the Registration of Children as British Nationals. It includes practical tips, exercises, tools and honest reflections by lawyers and young people about how to apply children’s rights methods and principles to all stages of the legal process.
The online training is complemented by bespoke face-to-face training for law firms and chambers and includes additional guidance on how to use the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in legal arguments. For further information about this training please contact Helen Stalford (stalford@liverpool.ac.uk).
Helen Stalford and Aoife Daly
ECRU has been delivering training to NHS nurses across the North of England on how to deal with consent in the context of school-based vaccinations.
The training responds to growing concerns among nurses that parents are failing, for various reasons, to consent to their children being vaccinated against illnesses such as HPV, a common sexually transmitted infection. This failure to consent means that hundreds of children in the North of England are left without adequate protection.
The training (a half-day session) provides nurses with updated knowledge of the current law relating to consent and capacity in a medical context and offers guidance on how to apply this law to practical scenarios to empower children to consent to their own vaccinations.
Helen Stalford acted as specialist advisor to the House of Lords EU sub-committee on Home Affairs Inquiry into the plight of unaccompanied children in the EU.
Dr Aoife Daly acts as a consultant on the Baring Foundation-funded project Kinship Counts. Aoife is working with Kinship Carers Liverpool and Liverpool Council on this project which seeks to embed human rights-based approaches to work with kinship carers, a group of persons who take on the care of children of other family members.
Kinship carers are often not treated as a distinct group with problems particular to them. They often receive little if any financial or other support. The project seeks to secure a number of tangible outcomes, for example greater access to information and a Liverpool Charter for Kinship Care.
Dr Aoife Daly is working with Dr Joshua Curtis (University of Liverpool) and Dr Yvonne McDermott Rees (University of Swansea) on a project commissioned by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission on good practice examples of implementing UN human rights treaties around the globe. The report which results from this work will inform the work of the Commission, facilitating it to better work for implementation of human rights in the UK.
