Children’s Rights Impact Assessment : The SCCYP Model – Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People

Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People (SCCYP) has developed a model for carrying out children’s rights impact assessment to facilitate the review of law, policy and practice. This model contains information on what assessments are, why they are necessary and how they should be carried out. The guide also contains a set of template forms for conducting assessments. Children’s rights impact assessments are a way of looking at decisions, policies or legislation and identifying and measuring their effect on children and young people and their rights. They allow the effect to be predicted, monitored and, if necessary, avoided or mitigated. In developing this assessment model, one of the goals has been to embed children’s rights in decision and policy making and, with this in mind, encourage decision and policy makers to carry out their own children’s rights impact assessments. The SCCYP model has been deliberately designed to be flexible in the hope that it can be used by others and adapted to suit their own needs.