When we say a setting is rights-respecting, what do we actually mean? Do the children, adults and families who spend time there feel safer, more heard, more in control of what happens to them? Or is the phrase something that sits neatly in a policy folder, quoted at inspection and mostly unnoticed the rest of the year?
Most of us who work in care and education want the answer to be the first one. We come into this work because we believe people matter, relationships matter, and positive change is possible. And still, in the honest moments, we know there is often a gap between the rights described on paper and the rights people live day to day.
This piece is for leaders and teams who want to close that gap. It looks at what a rights-respecting approach really involves, how it connects to the reduction of restrictive practice, and how a culture, not a checklist, is what actually protects dignity, choice and voice.
What does rights-respecting actually mean?
A rights-respecting approach is a way of working where every decision, every routine and every interaction is shaped by the recognition that the person in front of you has rights. It is not a separate module bolted onto practice. It is the lens through which practice happens.
In care and education, this means paying attention to how power moves in the room. Who decides when the day starts and ends, who gets to say no, and who is heard when something feels wrong?
Rights-respecting practice does not require anyone to abandon safety, structure or professional judgement. It asks us to hold all of those things alongside a steady question: are we protecting the dignity, voice and choice of the person being supported, even in the hardest moments?
The frameworks behind the phrase
Two frameworks sit behind most of what we describe as rights-respecting in the UK context. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is an international agreement setting out the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of every child. It underpins the Rights Respecting Schools Award and much of the language used in children’s services worldwide.
The Human Rights Act 1998 is UK-specific and gives effect to the European Convention on Human Rights in domestic law. It shapes how adult social care, health services, education and residential settings must respect rights such as dignity, private and family life, freedom from inhuman or degrading treatment and the right to liberty.
For teams working internationally, similar principles appear in national human rights instruments, equality legislation and inspection frameworks. CALM works with organisations in the UK, Ireland, parts of Europe, Canada, the USA, Australia, Greece and the Falkland Islands, and the language differs but the underlying commitment is consistent.
Why rights are a culture, not a checklist
Compliance can be written down. Culture is felt. You can meet every requirement on a monitoring form and still leave a young person feeling that their voice does not really count in the place they live.
Rights become real through everyday relational practice. Through the way someone is spoken to at breakfast, the way a request for a change is handled, the way a distressed person is supported when they cannot find the words.
This is why CALM describes rights-respecting as one of its six principles, sitting alongside being Trauma Responsive, a Systems Thinker, Self-Aware, Relationship Promoting and Always Learning. Rights are not a policy layer. They are woven through how a whole organisation thinks and behaves.
“Every person has the right to feel safe, be heard, and have choice in how they are supported.”
CALM Principle: Rights Respecting
Why reducing restrictive practice is a rights issue
When we talk about reducing restrictive practice, it can sound like a technical conversation about policy, thresholds and paperwork. It is not. It is a rights conversation.
Every time an adult or child is held, secluded, restricted in movement, sedated for behavioural reasons or prevented from making a choice, a right is affected. That may be justifiable in the moment, but it must never be routine, and it must never be invisible.
Leaders who take rights seriously look at their intervention data with the same care they give to safeguarding data. They ask what patterns are emerging, whose rights are most often affected, and what the organisation is doing to make those numbers change.
The CALM position: restrictive practice is never the goal
CALM has been consistent on this since the approach was developed in the 1990s. Restrictive practice is never the goal. The goal is to reduce stress, reduce harm, reduce restriction, and increase safety, understanding and positive outcomes for everyone involved.
That single sentence changes how a service designs its work. If restriction is not the goal, then the measure of success is not how efficiently restraint is used. The measure is how rarely it becomes necessary because prevention, relationships and environments are doing the heavier lifting.
You can read more about how this shapes whole-organisation practice on the CALM Restrictive Practice Reduction page.
Last resort, lawful, proportionate, quality assured
There are settings where physical intervention is sometimes needed to keep a person or those around them safe. Denying that would not serve anyone. What matters is what surrounds that intervention.
Where restrictive interventions are absolutely necessary, they must be lawful, proportionate, as non-invasive as possible, and carried out within a highly regulated, quality-assured framework that protects dignity, safety and accountability. That framework is not something a team invents in the moment. It is built over time through training, oversight, reflection and honest data.
CALM is BILD ACT Certified and Restraint Reduction Network approved, and has never offered diluted or non-certified physical intervention training. You can read more about that quality framework on the BILD ACT and RRN approved training page. CALM has gathered and published data on intervention use across CALM organisations for over twenty years, supporting transparency and the reduction of restrictive practices over time.
What rights-respecting practice looks like day to day
Rights sound abstract until you watch them in action. In the settings we work with, rights-respecting practice tends to show up in three linked ways: voice, choice and dignity.
None of these are grand gestures. They are the small, repeatable moments that add up to how a place feels to live in, learn in or work in.
Voice: the right to be heard
Voice is more than being asked for an opinion. It is being asked in a way that fits how you communicate, at a time when you can think, by someone who is prepared to act on what you say.
For a child in residential care, voice might sound like being able to tell a member of staff, without fear, that a routine feels unfair. For an adult with a learning disability, it might be the use of pictures, objects or trusted people to help shape a decision.
When a team asks, honestly, whose voice we have heard this week and whose we have not, they are already doing rights-respecting work.
Choice: real options rather than tokenistic ones
Choice is easy to fake and hard to do well. Offering someone the choice between two things you were happy with anyway is not really choice. Offering a young person a menu of activities and then discouraging every option except the quiet one is not really choice either.
Real choice includes the right to say no, the right to change your mind and the right to make a decision others might disagree with. It is bounded by safety, but it is not bounded by convenience.
Teams often notice their own patterns here. Where do we default to “because I said so”? Where do we rush past the moment where a real choice could sit?
Dignity: in every interaction, including the hardest ones
Dignity is easiest to hold when things are calm. It is harder, and more important, when things are not. How a person is spoken to during a distressing moment, how their body is treated during a physical intervention, and how they are supported afterwards, all of it shapes whether they feel like a person or a problem.
The CALM Trauma Course explores how distress shows up and how staff can respond in ways that protect dignity even when the situation is difficult.
Dignity is also about what happens next. A quiet check-in, a familiar voice, a repaired relationship, these are not soft extras. They are rights-respecting practice in its most everyday form.
Common gaps between policy and lived experience
One of the most useful things a leader can do is take a hard look at the gap between what the policies say and what the people in the setting would say if you asked them.
That gap is rarely the result of bad intent. It is usually the accumulated result of pressure, habit, staffing gaps and the pace of the day. Culture drifts, it does not usually collapse.
Where culture quietly drifts from intention
Drift often starts in language. The moment we start talking about a young person as “non-compliant”, we have stopped being curious. The moment we describe behaviour that challenges as something the person is choosing to do to us, we have lost the systems view.
Drift also shows up in routines that no longer have a reason. Rules that made sense with a different group of people, at a different time, quietly staying in place. Choices that used to be offered, no longer offered, because it is quicker not to.
None of this makes a team bad. It makes them human. Noticing it is the beginning of change.
How to notice the gap before it widens
One practical starting point is to ask three questions about a recent incident or decision: did this person have a voice, did they have a real choice, and was their dignity protected?
If the answer to any of those is uncomfortable, that is not a failure. It is information. It is where the learning is.
The Trauma Responsive Insights webinar series explores many of these questions in detail, drawing on the work of practitioners and researchers who have thought carefully about how to keep rights and relationships central in high-pressure work.
How leaders can build rights-respecting cultures
A rights-respecting culture is a leadership question before it is a training question. The tone at the top, the questions asked in supervision, the data reviewed at governance meetings, all of these shape what practice actually looks like on a Tuesday afternoon.
Leaders often ask where to start. In our experience, the honest answer is that you start where you already are: with the routines, incidents and conversations that are already happening, and you begin to hold them up against the rights lens.
Whole-organisational change, not single training events
Training is not the same as implementation. A one-off course, however good, will not change a culture on its own. What changes culture is a coherent, whole-organisational approach where training, supervision, policy, data and leadership all point in the same direction.
That is why CALM’s work with organisations is designed as a partnership rather than a transaction. Leading for CALM supports senior leaders and managers to develop strategic, trauma-informed, rights-respecting approaches across their whole setting.
A rights-respecting culture is built in the small, repeated decisions of leadership, not in the launch event.
Reflection, supervision and the Debrief course as protective infrastructure
Rights-respecting practice depends on staff who have the time, space and support to think. When teams are running on empty, reflection is the first thing to go, and drift follows quickly.
CALM positions the Debrief course as a form of prevention. Learning from distress, near-misses and incidents in a structured, compassionate way is one of the most powerful ways to protect the rights of the people you support and the wellbeing of the staff who support them.
This is the CALM Principle of Always Learning in action, and it links naturally with Self-Aware practice, where asking for support is understood as a sign of Professional Courage, not weakness.
Using data honestly to hold rights central
Data is not the opposite of relational practice. Used well, it is one of the ways an organisation stays honest about whose rights are most often affected and where practice needs to change.
CALM has gathered and published data on intervention use across CALM organisations for over twenty years, supporting transparency and the reduction of restrictive practices over time. That long view helps leaders move from anecdote to pattern, and from pattern to sustained change.
The point is not to chase a number. It is to make sure the people you support are visible in the data as people whose rights matter, not as incidents to be logged.
How CALM supports rights-respecting practice
CALM has spent more than twenty-eight years supporting organisations to build cultures where dignity, voice and choice are protected, and where restrictive practice is reduced through prevention and understanding rather than technique alone. The work is international, values-led and grounded in relational practice.
If you are thinking about how to strengthen a rights-respecting culture in your setting, a good place to start is with the Restrictive Practice Reduction page and the BILD ACT and RRN approved training overview. Both explain how CALM’s approach protects dignity while keeping staff and the people they support safe.
For deeper practitioner learning, the CALM Trauma Course and the Trauma Responsive Insights webinar series explore how distress, rights and relationships connect. And if you lead a team, Leading for CALM and the Debrief course offer practical infrastructure for the long, careful work of culture change.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a rights-respecting approach?
A rights-respecting approach is a way of working in which every routine, decision and interaction is shaped by the recognition that the person being supported has rights, including the right to feel safe, be heard and have choice. It is a culture rather than a checklist, and it sits alongside CALM’s other principles such as being Trauma Responsive and a Systems Thinker.
How do rights-respecting practices reduce restrictive interventions?
When teams centre voice, choice and dignity, distress is often recognised earlier and supported through relationships rather than restriction. Over time, this reduces the situations in which physical intervention feels necessary. You can read more about how this shapes practice on the CALM Restrictive Practice Reduction page.
What is the difference between compliance and a rights-respecting culture?
Compliance is what you can prove on paper. A rights-respecting culture is what a child, resident or family would describe if you asked them. Compliance is necessary, but it is not enough on its own to protect dignity, voice and choice in day-to-day practice.
How do schools become rights-respecting?
Schools become rights-respecting when the UNCRC or equivalent framework shapes daily practice, not just displays and policies. That means pupil voice is real, choice is genuine, and dignity is protected in behaviour support and in the hardest moments. CALM works with school leaders through Leading for CALM and its wider education training.
What does rights-based care look like day to day?
It looks like small, repeatable moments where the person being supported has a voice, a real choice and their dignity protected. It looks like teams who ask honest questions in supervision and use data on intervention use to learn, not just to report.
Is restrictive practice ever compatible with rights-respecting care?
Restrictive practice is never the goal. Where restrictive interventions are absolutely necessary, they must be lawful, proportionate, as non-invasive as possible, and carried out within a highly regulated, quality-assured framework that protects dignity, safety and accountability.
Where should leaders start when building a rights-respecting culture?
Start with the routines and incidents you already have and ask three questions about them: did the person have a voice, a real choice and their dignity protected? From there, invest in whole-organisational change through leadership development, reflective practice and the Debrief course as ongoing protective infrastructure.