Lawyers in Schools

Lawyers in Schools has been designed to support public legal education and, through its interactive and engaging sessions, it aims to raise awareness among young people of the law and its processes.

More about Lawyers in Schools

Lawyers in Schools was developed by the Citizenship Foundation, in partnership with Linklaters. It facilitates links between legal professionals and secondary schools, mainly in economically deprived areas. Lawyers in Schools provides an opportunity for lawyers and trainees to discuss and explore various legal issues with students from a local school. This unique employee volunteering opportunity draws on the core skills and knowledge of legal professionals and the Citizenship Foundation's expertise in educational partnerships. It offers clear educational benefits to young people and enables volunteers to gain a real insight into the lives and issues that affect young people in their local community.

The lawyers (trainees, qualified and paralegals) are trained and given specially written resources for use in the classroom. The resources are designed to be interactive and used with small groups of students. They cover issues such as discrimination, consumer law, employment law, human rights and youth justice.

The scheme has been running successfully since 1999 and currently runs in 22 secondary schools with 27 law firms and in-house legal departmetns across the UK, working with over 1,000 young people each year.

More about Lawyers in Schools and the Citizenship Foundation.

Updated January 2011

The Citizenship Foundation publishes a wide range of resources for teachers to use to education young people about their rights. More about citizenship education is here.