Rules, Rights and Responsibilities

As you grow older, you take on more responsibility. This means that your parents and your teacher put trust in you to behave well without always having to be supervised or told what to do. This is part of growing up. We all need to learn how to live in a way that we enjoy without hurting or annoying other people and disrupting their lives. We learn a lot about this in school!

Your school is a community.

This means it is a group of people who are all trying to live and work together so that everyone has an equal chance to learn and enjoy themselves. This includes the teachers! It is the teacher’s job to make sure that one person’s behaviour doesn’t upset the health and happiness of the whole class. That’s why there are rules.

It can be difficult at first to understand that you can’t always talk when you want to or decide to do something whenever you feel like it, such as eat or sing. It can also be hard to accept that you have to do some things when you don’t want to, such as working, reading or listening in class. However, doing what the teacher tells you is a very important part of school life.

School rules don’t exist to make you feel unhappy.

They are there to make sure that everyone gets a fair chance to learn. If we were all allowed to do anything we wanted, it would be a disaster! Pupils would get up and wander around the place. There would be so much noise that no-one could hear the teacher. Work wouldn’t get done and arguments would break out all the time. In fact, without rules, you would be very, very unhappy at school.

Organising a school so that it runs smoothly is not easy. Everyone has a part to play. The principal and the senior staff sort out who’s in what class, and make sure they have the correct information about all the pupils. The class teachers look after their pupils all day and bring them wherever they are supposed to be.

And then there are the caretakers who look after the buildings and grounds, the lollipop men and women, the classroom assistants, the substitute teachers, the bus drivers and of course, YOU the pupils! Imagine how tricky it is to get all these bits of a school running together. It’s no wonder we need rules. Even parents have to obey rules when they pick you up and drop you off.

You see, school is like a small version of the world outside. There are rules that everyone has to obey so that we can all get along together. You will learn these as you get older, but the same ideas apply as at school. You must behave in a way that doesn’t upset or endanger other people. So, listen to your teachers and do as they say, even if you don’t understand why. You’ll be happier and healthier if you do!