Academic:  Dr Simon Hoffman

Librarians: 

SALT Team:  Chris Hall

The Context

Children and the Law, is a 20 credits Level III, Law LLB, single and joint honours, elective final year module. Its primary subject area is children’s human rights and domestic (UK law).

This module uses the lens of international human rights to examine how the law in England and Wales regards children, and considers how law responds to meeting the challenge of implementing children's human rights. The module focuses on a number of key areas of children’s rights to discuss the policy and legal response in the UK. It also adopts a comparative approach paying attention to differences between what is taking place in England, and in Wales.

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

•    assimilate and analyse the sources of law relating to children adopting a human rights approach;
•   understand and describe the law relating to children in an informed and critical manner;
•    appreciate the law in its policy context;
•    understand and describe the impact on domestic law of children’s rights as identified in international law;
•   apply the law to a realistic hypothetical case, giving accurate information and a reasoned opinion;
•   demonstrate development and improvement in their research and presentational skills.

The module is taught by lecture and seminars over two semesters. The assessment method is: one-day examination (3,500 words, January); coursework (3,500 words, April).

There are two priorities that are relevant to the case study:

•    To ensure that students are able to recognise, locate and apply materials from a range of sources. Law students are used to study
•    To expose students to of disseminating information in a format that might be applicable to the field of work of children’s rights

The Approach

The activity undertaken as an aspect of delivery of LA-324 is to provide students with the opportunity to participate in volunteering activities with local Non-Governmental Organisations working in areas directly related to the subject matter. However, in order to reinforce learning, and in particular application of learning, the volunteering is structured so as to require students to produce an ‘output’ based on the volunteering activities. 

Whilst the activities are not compulsory they are available to all students. A practical problem might be ensuring sufficient engagement with NGO partners to provide adequate opportunities for all volunteers. To date this has not been an issue as volunteer numbers are about 20% of enrolled students.

In 2013/13 eleven volunteers participated in a project which involved working with a local child rights organisation to produce rights-based information literature for use by professionals. Students met with the project co-ordinator and with professionals working in a particular policy areas with children: in 2012/13 this was juvenile justice. The format of the meeting was ‘focus group’ style, with students able to ask questions about what information might be useful in their work.

Based on assessment and basic evaluation of 2012/13 further volunteering opportunities were offered to students in 2013/14. Volunteer numbers increased to twenty-two.

Key changes made as a result of the evaluation are:

1. Students are encouraged to form groups and work together, sharing responsibility and allocating tasks in order to spread the workload.
2. The module coordinator has taken a much stronger lead at the outset to organise students into groups and to ‘frontload’ support, including by arranging three initial meetings to outline the aims of the volunteering and to introduce the NGO project coordinator. 
3. Policy areas have been extended to children in the asylum process, children with learning difficulties, and, children living in situations of domestic violence to reflect student interests.
4. Students have been given more guidance on expectations  emphasising the need to produce an output and stronger direction is given on how to go about this.
5. The NGO coordinator has been given a more prominent role in supervising students, and in providing source information to students (the NGO coordinator has been given access to a student mailing list).

Volunteers have been offered more opportunities to participate in events organised by practitioners and children themselves (e.g. workshops).

Outcomes

As noted above, the evidence available to support reflective practice taking into account outcomes is limited. However, the following might be asserted from discussions with students:

•   Students participating indicated that they had enjoyed the volunteering and had gained insights into the way children’s rights are delivered in practice. 
•   Students who dropped out of the project reported that this was because: [1] they had other more pressing commitments; [2] they were worried that they might
    not be able to produce the desired outcome (i.e. information literature).
•   Students who took part and completed the project said it had helped them with their understanding of the subject.

The volunteering will continue. It will be assessed at the end of 2013/14 to consider whether or not the changes introduced as 1-6 above have resulted in more sustained student engagement and better outputs. If time allows student achievement will be considered with a view to assessing impact on performance.