One Year of Leducate
It’s been a big year for Leducate! Since achieving charity status last year, Leducate has grown and grown, and we are so pleased to have realised its journey from its conception as a student dream at University through to today.
We were incredibly proud to welcome Lord Neuberger as our patron at the start of our year, and have been so thankful for his support for our mission to empower young people by delivering the legal education they need to get on in life and make smarter life choices. Speaking at our launch event in June at Middle Temple, Lord Neuberger reminded us just how important public legal education is in this day and age, something we acknowledged on Universal Access to Education Day on 28th September.
Shortly afterwards, we were thrilled to sign up King Solomon Academy in London as our first partner school. Throughout this year we have been working to supplement their daily teaching with weekly lessons on topics from finance and employment law to themes they’ll inevitably come across at secondary school such as drinking, sex and relationships. Leducate is happy to teach them about how to manage their online presence and engage in modern dating safely as well as how to counteract negative influences that might draw them towards criminal activity. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed speaking to students about the laws that will affect them in daily life.
We celebrated the work of all of our fantastic teaching partners on World Teacher’s Day on the 5th October. We are now also working with Red Hill Academy in Nottingham, and are looking forward to signing up more schools in the next year.
As a charity, we rely on fundraising, and in June we joined 15,000 lawyers to take on a 10k walk around London as part of the London Legal Walk. Later, in October we were so pleased to be represented at the Amsterdam Marathon by Beth Evington, who did a great job raising money for our cause, and achieved a fantastic time in the race. We are so thankful and proud of her achievement.
Volunteers are part and parcel of our work, from the people who volunteer to help us fundraise, and the team that works hard to develop and grow Leducate and its mission on a daily basis. We are pleased to have a body of hard working volunteers helping us develop our tailored curriculum so that young people without access to an education in the law can be inspired and empowered through public legal education. For example, in December, our volunteer Calin blogged for us on the importance of Human Rights for Human Rights Day on 10th December.
We celebrated their work on International Volunteer Day, and were pleased to share the thoughts of some of our volunteers, partners and ambassadors on what pro bono means to them during Pro Bono Week in November. We also heard from our Director, Adam, who told us why public legal education was crucial in a fantastic piece in the Law Society Gazette.
In the next year, we have plenty of things to look forward to. We’re eager to get started on our first careers programme and we’re also keen to get involved in National Justice Week run by the Law Society in February. Stay tuned for more on our work during the week.
In the meantime, we will be continuing to support, promote and enable public legal education as a resource to empower young people and allow them to make smarter life choices in the legalised world in which we live.
Heading into 2020, we want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has made Leducate such a success in our first year. We look forward to what 2020 brings!