About our Children’s Rights Teaching Resources

Why we have developed Children’s Rights resources

The Roald Dahl Museum has developed resources for UK primary schools at Key Stage 2 to explore the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) through characters and incidents in Roald Dahl stories. Find out more about the UNCRC though UNICEF UK.

We developed these resources as part of our commitment to being more welcoming, inclusive, diverse, and equitable. They are also part of addressing the legacy of Roald Dahl’s racism towards Jewish people; the Roald Dahl Museum condemns all racism directed at any group or individual.

We believe that free resources that help people understand universal, inalienable rights is a constructive way to help combat prejudice. Prejudice means having an opinion that is not based on reason or evidence, such as believing some groups of people have more rights than others. Understanding universal rights challenges this kind of prejudice.

These Children’s Rights resources are a direct outcome from our consultation with organisations from the Jewish community, and a focus group of Key Stage 2 teachers. We established a focus group of Key Stage 2 teachers to test our early ideas and review the resources as they developed from draft to draft. Finally, some of the teachers agreed to test the resources in schools, giving us feedback to produce the final designs.

Why has the Roald Dahl Museum not produced resources directly about antisemitism?

This has been a careful and considered process. We have listened to members of the Jewish community, and we have listened to teachers who we hope will use the resources.

Our approach to developing a constructive response to the legacy of Dahl’s racism has been deliberately universal: we do not think we are the right organisation to try and deliver education directly about antisemitism on our own. Expert organisations already working in this area include the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Antisemitism Policy Trust, Community Security Trust. The Holocaust Educational Trust specialises in teaching about the Holocaust.

Our initial consultation established some important considerations:

• Directly combating antisemitism is a specialist task which ideally is based on expertise and information about Jewish people. Our training from the Antisemitism Policy Trust has taught us that it is not appropriate to introduce Jewish people solely in terms of the prejudice experienced by the Jewish community.
• Any response made by the Roald Dahl Museum to the legacy of Dahl’s racism should be constructive and encourage positive action in the present and future, for as many people as possible.
• For the Roald Dahl Museum, it makes sense to work with the popular appeal of Roald Dahl’s stories and characters.
• Key Stage 2 (upper primary phase) is the principal reading age for Roald Dahl’s stories and for children visiting the Roald Dahl Museum. In turn, the Holocaust and more specific teaching about antisemitism through that aspect of history typically happens in the UK National Curriculum at Key Stage 3 (lower secondary phase).

We felt this all indicated an opportunity to support teaching in primary school through developing Key Stage 2 resources exploring children’s rights through the experiences of Roald Dahl’s child heroes.

We want to keep listening and talking to explore how our organisation might make further contributions towards combating hate and prejudice, supporting the work of established experts, including those from the Jewish community.

Roald Dahl’s racism is undeniable and indelible but what we hope can also endure is the potential of Dahl’s creative legacy to do some good.

Use the resources for free

These Children’s Rights resources are available to download for free from our School Resources webpages. The resources have been made possible by donations from a Dahl family trust which was established to combat antisemitism and racism.