Law for Life: the Foundation for Public Legal Education is a charity dedicated to ensuring that people have the knowledge, confidence and skills needed to deal with law-related issues.
Our April newsletter has a report of the Canadian experience of cuts, lessons from health on prevention, and the DofE consultation on changes to the citizenship curriculum.
Public legal education aims at increasing our capacity to deal with legal issues - by improving our understanding of the law, explaining when and how to take action, or by making better choices and avoiding problems.
Law for Life works with a range of partners to develop and run public legal education projects to increase participants' legal capability.
These projects give a flavour of the diversity of PLE initiatives. We’ve arranged them by broad themes: raising awareness, self-help and legal capability, and community development and law reform.
A selection of materials that make for successful PLE. They are targeted to meet the needs of their users from raising awareness of discrimination, the wisdom of going to court to a survival guide for divorce.
A selection of best practice guides and tools for successful PLE projects, including practical tools for making sure information is accessible and relevant, a classification system and guidance on how to evaluate a PLE project.
PLE covers a wide range of research and evaluation disciplines, from legal and education theory to empirical research. In order to thrive PLE needs to build and improve the body of knowledge that lies at its core.
This section has articles discussing key issues around the development of PLE including legal capability. The aim is to provoke discussion and debate, and build the body of knowledge of how to deliver PLE effectively.
In many countries, PLE is already an important component of models to provide a community legal service. This section has a selection of inspiring international initiatives including recent events and developments
Awareness of PLE continues to grow and several important conferences have taken place. Looking back we can see how these mark key stages in the development of PLE in the UK.