We support all areas of legal education where this advances the following objectives:
To increase public understanding of the law and the capability to use it.
We want to support people of all ages to build broader legal knowledge and capability. Helping people to learn about when problems may have a law-related solution and about how to be confident in pursuing this or securing help to do so means that beneficial opportunities to use the law are not missed. We recognise that having the capability to use legal knowledge inevitably involves tackling how people interact with the legal system and how the system can, in turn, learn about how to be accessible, efficient and effective.
To advance high quality thinking, training and practice in legal education and legal services so as to ensure legal needs are met.
We want to support work that explores ways of meeting legal needs in effective, sustainable ways and at scale. For example, this might involve, supporting professional, academic and clinical legal education around this focus, plus research and development activity on delivery models, income streams, uses of technology, collaboration between legal services organisations and with others outside the legal sector, early action and proactive use of the law.
To increase access to employment in the legal profession and, in particular, to advance social mobility and diversity.
We want to ensure that people are attracted to, and are able to, pursue careers in legal services at all levels, particularly to reflect the diversity of the population. We believe that it is vital to support the next generation of skilled and committed people who will ensure that the law plays the role set out in our vision.
Two further objectives underpin those above and will be integral to taking each of them forward.
To develop a robust evidence base of needs in each of the areas above and of effective ways of meeting these needs.
We want to build robust evidence of needs and of effective legal education and legal services that meet these needs. This will include understanding more about nature of needs amongst individuals and organisations and the environment in which these needs exist; finding existing good practice and examining how and why it works; rigorously examining the outcomes of our own work and capturing and sharing evidence so that it is widely acted upon.
To understand the role that technology can play in achieving each of these objectives.
We recognise that technology is not the magic bullet for achieving our vision and mission but that it has a major role to play. We want to understand more about how technology is currently being used across each of our areas of interest, how it could be used to greater effect and how to harness future developments.
