We have spoken to over 62,000 young people nationwide so far. We have currently approximately 300 volunteer lawyers and we are always looking to onboard more.

 

The idea behind it is if you if you go into schools and introduce consent literacy at a young age, young people are going to make more informed, more ethical decisions and they're less likely to experience or perpetrate sexual violence in later life.

 

What is the training like?

For an organisation, I offer a “lunch and learn” or online Q&A session. You don't have to take me up on that, but it's a nice way to get to know the charity and meet me and ask questions.

 

Once there's a critical mass of interested people, we will then do a two-hour midweek training session where we teach you everything from how to deliver a School's Consent Project workshop, how to use a space, what to do with a rowdy class or a quiet class, and how to deal with a disclosure in the moment.

 

We provide free materials including workshop notes, a background pack (which will lay out all the relevant law) and a pre-recorded workshop. No-one has to worry about not being a criminal lawyer, these are all things that someone with a legal background can easily learn and cover.

 

Once the training is finished, we do a short assessment which involves delivering some of the slides in our workshop. Once a person has passed that, we do an enhanced DBS check on them (at our cost) and then you are officially a Schools Consent Project volunteer with access to our regular email list which lists all the upcoming workshop opportunities. It’s a first-come-first-served system for booking workshops and we have a lot of schools interested at the moment. Our schools cover the costs of travelling to deliver the workshop and, after a workshop, we gather feedback from the volunteer.

 

Once someone has delivered workshops in schools, we encourage them to consider a Royal Air Force workshop or an English Football League workshop, which work better for more experienced volunteers as the audience consists of young adults rather than children.

 

Is there a time commitment?

We have a goal - and stress that it's a goal and not a requirement - of six workshops per year, per volunteer. So what that means is two per academic term. The workshops are only an hour long, so they are discrete chunks of time.

 

Some schools book several workshops back-to-back with different year groups and sometimes our volunteers like to do several in a row to fulfil their commitment in one go.

 

Is there a fee involved?

We do need to charge a fee so that we can cover our training and operating costs and subsidise those schools in very deprived areas that can’t afford to pay for the workshops.

 

We charge law firms £5,000 to join us and some companies have had their costs covered by a law firm that they partner with as part of their pro bono efforts. In some cases, a group of in-house lawyers from different companies have clubbed together to cover the cost of the training session as I understand that in companies often don’t have much of a budget.

 

If there is an individual lawyer that wants to do the training then it obviously doesn’t make sense to charge that amount, so we will look at things on a case-by-case basis and take a sensible approach. But once there is a big enough group of people, we move them to our membership fee structure so we can keep expanding and reaching more schools.

 

Where can I find out more?

I would encourage people thinking about volunteering to watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKaw7c4Y4HE and check out our website and contact me on Kate@schoolsconsentproject.com.