By Dr Ali Struthers & Dr Malvika Unnithan
Introduction
With increasing regularity and from a much younger age, children are being exposed to scenarios that have legal significance. To name just a few, children are far more likely to have mobile phones, to navigate the digital world, and to have greater exposure to the news and world events. Despite this, legal education has tended to focus to a greater extent on older children or adults. To highlight and promote some of the work being done with younger children in this area, an event entitled ‘Legal Education in Primary Schools: Ideas, Realities and Practicalities’ was organised by Dr Malvika Unnithan and Dr Ali Struthers, with support from the Association of Law Teachers (ALT). This event was intended to showcase some of the research, practices, and lived experiences of academics, practitioners and young people with regard to public legal education. This article sheds light on the purpose, discussion, and reflections from the event, with the intention of growing interest and community within this field.
Background and Rationale
Despite (i) children having had rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) since 1992;[i] and (ii) the age of criminal responsibility having being set at ten in England and Wales for over 60 years,[ii] there remains a paucity of legal education in primary schools in England.[iii] Whilst children are recognised as holding a special status that distinguishes them from adults, on the stroke of midnight on their tenth birthday, they become criminally responsible for their actions. This brightline delineation of criminal responsibility seems particularly problematic in the context of the numerous and intersecting factors that can affect a child’s ability to understand the implications of this.[iv]Without Law as a subject forming part of the current National Curriculum in primary schools in England, children and young people are unlikely to truly understand the impact and relevance of criminal responsibility, nor to appreciate the rights to which they have been entitled since birth. When considered in this context, equipping them with a basic understanding of law, including human rights, is fundamental to their position as active and informed citizens of our society. This is outlined in Article 42 of the UNCRC, which explicitly states that governments should actively work to make sure that children and adults know about the Convention and the rights to which they are entitled.
In our research, we have found that legal education may be accessible only to certain groups of people (principally adults), leaving children less well-informed and often reliant on information about law derived either from (i) the media, where portrayals can be inaccurate or sensationalised; or (ii) their own lived experiences of being in conflict with the law, or through family members who have had such experiences.[v] This enables insidious government narratives that law is only applicable to ‘bad people’ to perpetuate,[vi] with the categories of people perceived to be ‘bad’ often reflecting classist and racist ideologies.[vii] This type of stereotyping furthermore shifts the narrative away from fundamental legal protections, including the basics of what the law is and who it is for, and generally stifles legal literacy. All of this provides a compelling reason for introducing law to children at an early age as a means of potentially disrupting these preconceptions of the legal system.
The ‘Legal Education in Primary Schools’ event featured a number of projects that are actively involved in plugging this gap in early legal education. These will be discussed in more detail in the ‘Event and Discussion Points’ section below, but the idea behind the roundtable was very much to showcase the work being done in existing projects as a means of inspiring the creation of a community of practice around legal education in primary schools.[viii] It is hoped, in turn, that the fostering of such a community would encourage the development of a more comprehensive and child-centred legal education framework for younger learners. Dynamic and engaging discussions on interesting legal topics with children of primary school age can, in turn, encourage the development of critical thinking skills that will enable young people to be more questioning of the narratives perpetuated by government and the media.[ix] They may then better understand that the law is there to protect and empower them, and be more critical of government action that undermines fundamental legal and human rights protections. Early legal education can thus serve to strip away some of the privilege and accessibility issues surrounding legal knowledge by making it comprehensible to the youngest, and often most vulnerable, members of our society.
Purpose
As we are both academics carrying out research in this area, the idea for this event came from the desire to create a shared, safe space to bring together academics, practitioners and young people with an interest in early public legal education. We were conscious that legal education tends to happen with older learners, at secondary or higher education level, and there are many who subscribe to the position that this can be too late. Secondary legal education also tends to happen predominantly in a widening participation context, where university Law Schools run outreach sessions in schools with lower progression rates into higher education. As a result, teaching primary school children about the law is often overlooked, or deemed to be superfluous, despite both the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales and the fact that children have rights under the UNCRC from the moment they are born.[x]
In an effort to bridge this gap, we proposed an event which would highlight this under-researched area of legal education and support the sharing of ideas and good practice amongst individuals attentive to legal issues affecting children. The event was designed to explore the underlying reasons why legal education should start with young children, as well as the issues, challenges, and barriers to achieving this. The main aim of the event was to promote an open dialogue between different groups of people with an interest in early public legal education, including discussions with young people themselves. The ideas and practices shared would then provide the foundation for a community of practice and encourage the development of a framework for collaboration, knowledge exchange, informing education policy, and the creation of projects, resources, and tools. The event itself was therefore organised as something of a scoping session in order to find out what the community of academics, teachers, school staff, education coordinators, parents/guardians, and young people require in order to strengthen legal literacy in primary schools.
Design
In our ALT funding application, we proposed three distinct stages for this project. The first was to plan the nature of the undertaking and the event that was central to realising this. This involved creating a guideline for the event using a roundtable model, including key points for discussion and ideas for how to facilitate attendee participation during and afterwards. Most of the funding requested was to enable attendees from a variety of locations across the country to participate without financial constraints. Material for advertising the event was designed to ensure that attendees would be able to join the event with opportunities to get in touch if they needed support with attendance. The possibility of in-person attendance was thus central to our advertising strategy at this stage, as we wished to ensure that all those with an interest in attending in-person were able to do so.
The next stage was organising the roundtable-style event. This method is often used to create connections between disparate communities of practice and encourage open and inclusive communication, with opportunities for participations to share their knowledge, experiences, and perspectives.[xi] It is also a useful way to tailor an event towards a specific theme for discussion. In this case, we wanted the focal point for discussion to be early legal education in primary schools in England. With this in mind, the discussion was focused upon English education policy and curricula, though we are keen to broaden this scope going forward. The event was designed in this way in order to facilitate the development of a community dedicated to supporting children’s legal education through research and practice. Organising a roundtable allowed us to better understand how this community can be supported to facilitate real change within the education system.
Following the event, we planned to share the discussion points raised, alongside a summary of the projects that were presented, in a written publication. This blogpost is our attempt to pull together these strands in order to build the case for the importance of early legal education. In the long term, we hope to further build the community of practice through similar roundtable events, virtual gatherings to share ongoing work, and potentially applying for funding to create an established research network. We are seeking to do all this to further the overall goal of developing a comprehensive legal education framework for primary schools through participatory research methods.
Event and Discussion Points
The event took place on the 8th of April 2025 at Northumbria Law School. We had a total of 24 people attend in person and 3 online attendees. Some participants travelled from the south of England, whilst others came from around the Northeast. Newcastle upon Tyne was chosen as the venue for cost reasons, but also because the event immediately preceded the ALT conference at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, making it enroute for some attendees from England and Wales. The composition of attendees was mixed. Most were academics, but we also had a couple of education coordinators, one teacher and 2 children participating in the event. Amongst this group, a number were parents of children who currently are, or have been, of primary school age so they were able to contribute to the discussion from both their work and domestic experiences and perspectives.
The event began with a presentation by Professor Dawn Watkins on her work around children’s legal capability. Dawn discussed Project FORTITUDE, an innovative research project that uses game-based learning to increase children and young people’s legal capability. The project is based on two key elements: (i) developing children’s legal consciousness by helping them to identify legal problems in their lives; and (ii) de-centering the law by focusing instead on identifying the relevant issue, with legal principle only relevant when the young person seeks to find out what action they can take. As part of this presentation, Dawn gave attendees the opportunity to explore a beta-version of her game, Law Yeah!, whilst providing insight into the discussions the team (including a children’s advisory board) had about its design and content.
In the next session, Ali discussed her successful university outreach initiative, School Tasking, as an example of a project that is making strides towards addressing the legal knowledge gap for children from less-advantaged backgrounds across the UK and Ireland.18 School Tasking uses innovative and engaging activities, based on the format of the hit television show, Taskmaster, in order to teach Year 5s (aged 9-10) about law. One of the aims behind the outreach initiative is to encourage children from underrepresented backgrounds to consider higher, and ideally legal, education as a potential option for them, should they choose to go down that path.19 Because Law does not form part of the primary curriculum, School Tasking can focus on the most interesting, curious, contentious, and (occasionally) gruesome aspects of law in order to pique the interest of it young participants, all whilst supporting the development of their legal literacy and other legal skills, such as advocacy, reasoning, problem-solving, and critical thinking.20 In the presentation, examples of some of the legal concepts focused upon in the project were provided, alongside the opportunity for attendees to try out some of the tasks and activities.
Dr Emily Finch and Dr Filipa Taveres Moreira Bispo ran an interactive session with the attendees using the World Cafe Method. The session was based on introducing knowledge of criminal law within school education and the possible ways in which it could be taught in primary schools. Those attending were asked to split into groups with a large piece of paper on each table to respond to the questions posed. At the end of the discussion time, all members of the table except one moved to another group to discuss a different, but related, aspect of the topic. Three rounds using this approach were completed, with the questions focusing upon: (i) why children should learn about criminal law; (ii) what aspects of criminal law they should learn about; and (iii) how they can they be taught effectively about this topic. There followed a whole group discussion on each of the questions to elaborate on the points raised in the small groups. Topics such as the age of criminal responsibility, learning about children’s rights, knowledge of offences, and media coverage versus reality all featured in this broader discussion.
Professor Emily Allbon then presented on legal design and learning about the law. She began by explaining the idea behind legal design and how it can be used to empower individuals with both the agency and legal information required to make informed decisions. The human-centered approach to design keeps the individuals who are most affected by it as the focal point throughout the design process. To illustrate how this works in practice, Emily asked the attendees to draw out a school rule on a Post-It note. She then paired up attendees and asked them to discuss how they would feel if they were punished for breaking the rule whilst their friend got away with infringing the same rule. The emotions identified by the attendees were then placed onto an empathy map, showing how that particular injustice would impact those in the room. Although Emily’s work is usually aimed at university students and upwards, she showcased how legal design could be used to make the law more accessible to children within the school context by providing some examples from her various projects.
Arthur Isaac, a children’s rights and youth participation consultant, presented on understanding children’s rights in reality. He shared his experience as a 17-year old whose work has been centered around the UNCRC, especially Article 12. His presentation focused on his experience of helping children to understand their rights, as outlined in the UNCRC, in a deeper and more meaningful way. He emphasised how this goes beyond simply being able to list the rights contained in the UNCRC, but extends instead to young people understanding how these rights work in practice and why they matter. Arthur, along with other youth participants, have engaged with storytelling, visualising, and contextualising in order to create a book that supports children in realising their rights. This youth-led content delves into the rights to which all children are entitled, and promotes discussion, debate, and innovation amongst those who read it.
The final session of the day was led by Lucinda Acland and Alma-Constance Denis-Smith on the power of podcasting. Lucinda and Alma-Constance host the Kids Law Podcast which uses the podcasting format to discuss and disseminate legal knowledge through speaking to key legal figures on topics of particular interest. Notable guests have included Lady Brenda Hale, Adam Wagner QC, and The Secret Barrister. In this presentation, Lucinda and Alma-Constance spoke about how the Kids Law podcast came about, its growth in listenership, and their experience of working on the podcast together. They illustrated how podcasting can be an effective tool to make the law more accessible by making legal content interesting and engaging for young people, and by empowering those young people to make informed decisions and challenge misinformation. Ideas for integrating podcasts into school classrooms were also discussed.
Reflections and Next Steps
The feedback from the event was incredibly positive with many attendees sharing their appreciation for the opportunity to connect with others who have similar interests and concerns around early public legal education. The dissemination of research, experience, and current practice was central to the event’s success and helped those in attendance broaden their knowledge and thinking around legal education in primary schools. The relatively low numbers of young people and teachers present was unfortunate, but ensuring that these voices are represented is going to be central to any project follow-up. By facilitating a dedicated and open forum for young people to explore their understanding of rights, responsibilities, and their role in society, we will seek to develop more meaningful and accessible approaches to legal education for children in primary schools.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Association of Law Teachers for their support with this project. The event that took place on the 8th of April 2025 and our plans for the next steps would not be possible without their funding. A huge thank you to everyone who attended the event to make it such an insightful and thought-provoking day.
[i] Department for Education, ‘United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC): How Legislation Underpins Implementation in England’ (GOV.UK, 15 March 2010)
[ii] Section 16 Children and Young Persons Act 1963
[iii] Alison E.C. Struthers, Teaching human rights in primary schools : overcoming the barriers to effective practice, (New York, Routledge, 2019); Malvika Unnithan, “An Exploratory Study on the Role of School Education in Informing Children about the Age of Criminal Responsibility in England and Wales: A Case Study in North-East England” (PhD thesis, Northumbria University 2022)
[iv] Stephen Case and Tim Bateman, ‘The Punitive Transition In Youth Justice: Reconstructing The Child As Offender’ (2020) 34 Children & Society.
[v] Alison E Struthers and Siobhan McConnell, ‘Improve Children’s Legal Knowledge and Skills through School Tasking: Your Time Starts Now’ (2023) 58 The Law Teacher 1.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Malvika Unnithan, “An Exploratory Study on the Role of School Education in Informing Children about the Age of Criminal Responsibility in England and Wales: A Case Study in North-East England” (PhD thesis, Northumbria University 2022)
[viii] Project FORTITUDE) <https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/fortitude> accessed 24 May 2024
[ix] Alison E Struthers and Siobhan McConnell, ‘Improve Children’s Legal Knowledge and Skills through School Tasking: Your Time Starts Now’ (2023) 58 The Law Teacher 1.
[x] Children and Young Persons Act 1963 s 16(1); Raymond Arthur and Malvika Unnithan, ‘Children know right from wrong’ – an examination into the role of compulsory education in informing children about the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility in England and Wales (2026) Child and Family Law Quarterly (1) (Accepted/Pre-print)
[xi] Jennifer Romich and Taurmini Fentress. ‘The Policy Roundtable Model: Encouraging Scholar – Practitioner Collaborations to Address Poverty-Related Social Problems’ (2019) 45(1) Journal of Social Service Research 76; Jacquelin McDonald, ‘Communities of Practice’, International Encyclopaedia of the Social & Behavioural Sciences (2nd edn, Elsevier Ltd 2015).
