The right to education in Europe: a reading from the Rights of the Child

In this article, we analyse two issues related to the rights of the child. In the first place, we emphasise an educational reading of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and its pedagogical implications within the framework of the right to education. In the second place, using the reports of the Committee for the Rights of the Child as information sources, we focus our analysis on the status of this right in Europe, employing Tomasevski's 4As scheme: Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability. Among the conclusions, we highlight that broadly speaking, compulsory and free education is guaranteed in most European countries. However, certain problems exist such as access to schooling owing to discrimination towards some concrete groups (e.g. the Romany minority or disabled persons), or the practice of forms of discipline that are incompatible with the CRC, and the insufficient treatment of Human Rights in the school curriculum.