We recently recorded Evie and Hamza, two of our Child Human Rights Defenders, in their preparation for the Scottish Government Executive Team Takeover 2025. We’ve transcribed the recordings and shared below are the children’s views on mental health and bullying in schools.
Tomorrow, we meet with the team at the Scottish Government to share our garden with all the things we want to change. Our garden is all about Mental Health and Bullying in Schools. We are both Children’s Human Rights Defenders as part of the Children’s Parliament.
You may already know this is an important issue. We have broken this into three key areas based on what children have told us in surveys across Scotland and through interviews and missions in schools. One of the main problems is that there’s a cycle of bad mental health, which can cause bullying, and bullying can cause bad mental health. Some children around Scotland say that this problem cannot be fixed, we want the adults to prove them wrong.
These are our calls to action for the Scottish Government:
As well as children, teachers need a safe environment for them with everyone’s rights at heart. Teachers need more support. When we went to primary schools across Scotland, we found out from children this was a problem. The teachers’ interviews also told us that they believe that if their mental health isn’t taken seriously and supported, then, how can they teach children and be a good role model for them?
Children need a safe space. We believe that the whole school should be a safe space. But to start small, we should have safe spaces available for all children in schools with children’s rights at heart.
We found that children around Scotland have said that they don’t know what to do while they’re being bullied. So that’s why we think that everyone should learn from P1 about it, being able to tell the teacher and know not to hit and how to calm down. Everyone should be learning about help for bad mental health and bullying.
These are very important issues for us, and we know that children and teachers across Scotland agree! We hope that the Government will take them seriously.
by the Child Human Rights Defenders