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2024-01-31-accounts

Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statement – 2023 24

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Overview

LEDUCATE IN 2023

Message from the Chair and Director 3 About Us 5 Our Strategy 7 Our Work 8 Our Objectives 9 Our Highlights this Year 10

FINANCES

Summary of Income and Expenditure 12 Financial Commentary 12

GOVERNANCE

Structure, Governance and Management 14

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Message from the Chair and Director

Dear valued stakeholders,

We are pleased to present our annual report for the period of January 2023 to January 2024.

Over the past year, we have continued to work to educate the public about the law. The challenges facing schools and teachers in the last year have highlighted the importance of our work, and we are proud to have played a part in supporting education for all.

In this report, we will provide an overview of our achievements, financial performance, and impact over the past year. We see further growth on the horizon, driven by our strong relationships with partner schools and the opportunities provided by our breadth of offer that provide such great value to their young people. Fundamentally, our scalable model continues to prove itself able to rise to any challenge.

We are particularly proud to have continued our long-standing partnership with the Red Hill Trust of schools in delivering sessions to their students as part of their ‘Moving On Day’, involving over 250 students across two school campuses. Our focus this year was on delivering our ‘Consent and Healthy Relationships’ module in order to give students the best preparation for the intricacies of the modern dating world and equipping them with the best tools to stay safe and support others as they transition into life beyond school. We were also delighted to continue our work with City Law School’s ProBono Society, taking part in panel discussions promoting the benefits of ProBono and other forms of volunteer work to give their members a more holistic picture of how volunteering their time can enrich their future careers, no matter the sector they choose to join after graduation.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our donors, partners, volunteers, and officers for their support and commitment to our cause. Without their contributions, we would not be able to take the strides that we have. In particular, we must recognise the unwavering dedication of teachers to providing the best education possible to their students, in which we are honoured to be able to help.

Behind the scenes we are undertaking a root-and-stem reorganisation of how we do business - moving to a more dynamic and flexible management structure in the Directorate whilst recruiting new specialist staff members to operate the various branches of delivery and strategic thinking. The Directorate have identified new roles within the team to take ensure that we have people with the right expertise

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leading the way in specialist internal roles and that we have the highest capability in-house to deliver on our financial regulatory responsibilities as well as to guide our fundraising efforts into the forthcoming year.

We hope that this report demonstrates our dedication to transparency and accountability and provides insight into the progress we have made towards our goals. We welcome any feedback or questions and look forward to continuing our work towards a better future for all.

Sincerely,

Adam Kayani - Director and Chair of Trustees

Adam Kayani, Director and Chair of Trustees

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About Us

Leducate is a legal educational charity that promotes people having a better understanding of the law and everyday legal rights especially amongst young people. We provide curriculum resources, support, sessions, and training allowing teachers to deliver lessons on a range of legal topics easily and for no cost. Our sessions cover topics from criminal responsibility, including interacting with the police and driving offences, to consumer finance and debt, and human rights.

Our curriculum aims to inform students of what their legal rights are (and where they come from), empower them with the confidence to use them and ultimately enable them to become thriving members of society. Lastly, we hope to encourage young people to explore a career in law.

Our curriculum aims to make the law more accessible than ever, focussing on day to day legal scenarios that reflect the situations young people will most likely find themselves in, using the most interactive and engaging methods available.

Since teachers know their students best, Leducate provides tailored training packages to enable them to deliver high quality legal education to their students. We focus on minimising the effort required by the teacher and school so that they can focus on their students.

In their own classrooms, students will learn the answers to questions including:

Armed with this knowledge, they may feel confident enough to hold local government decision-makers to account, enforce their rights against unfair opposition from big corporations or rogue landlords, and understand their civic rights and responsibilities enough to effectively participate in a society that they feel supports them.

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We passionately believe that empowering young people with an understanding of the law will improve their attitude towards it, and support their journey into becoming informed, active members of society as adults.

At the same time, we hope that our curriculum will encourage young people from underrepresented communities to explore careers in the law, which they might not otherwise have felt they had access to. In the longer term, we hope that this will broaden diversity and inclusion in the legal sector, which for too long has not been reflective of the diverse demography of England and Wales.

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Our Strategy

Leducate’s purpose, as set out in its constitution, is to:

Advance the education of the public in general and, in particular, young people on the subject of law by providing an online portal and in such other ways as the trustees consider appropriate.

Leducate’s objective is to provide free legal education for everyone on their rights and responsibilities. A major part of our strategy in this is to achieve a basic legal literacy in all secondary school leavers. We are achieving this by creating curriculum and classroom resources that are delivered by teachers to their students, from professionally illustrated and designed work books to interactive online sessions. We call this ‘Leducation’.

In addition to our core provision, Leducate aims to give students and teachers in its partner schools access to a wider range of activities that will expand their interest in and understanding of legal affairs more broadly. This programme, known as ‘Inspire’, includes initiatives such as trips to legal institutions and educational facilities and presentations by keynote speakers. Inspire is designed to support the core curriculum, so students do not just learn about how laws are made, but actually see where they are made and speak with those who impact their creation.

Finally, through its ‘Aspire’ programme, Leducate aims to encourage a broad range of young people to aspire to pursue further legal education and careers in the legal sector through taking part in and providing events focussed on university admissions and professional networking in the profession. Our Aspire programme supports young people in whatever route they wish to take to practise law in their future careers.

The Trustees are in agreement that our aims fully reflect the purpose that the charity was created to further.

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Our Work

2023 continues to be a year where Leducate expands and sets confirms its place as a reliable provider of public legal education. Leducate’s focus this year has been on consolidating the hard work of the past 4 years to ensure that we continue to be a leader in public legal education.

We worked hard to ensure we continued to provide legal education to a range of at moving on day, with our partner school and our curriculum material is updated and amended to reflect changes to the law. We published regular articles in our LeducateExplains series to continue to develop and grow our library of supplementary legal articles to demystify the law.

Leducate also focused this year on ensuring our staff, all volunteers, are able to continue to provide the ever high level of work that enables Leducate to run. We put into place strategies and structures to ensure staff can continue to operate alongside any other commitments and work without burnout.

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Our Objectives

Leducate manages its performance over the course of each year by setting objectives. In 2023, our objectives within our 3 key areas were:

As the reader will see below, the Trustees are satisfied that Leducate has successfully furthered these objectives.

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Our Highlights this Year

2023 was a year working alongside schools to fundamentally re-evaluate what it means to educate young people in the after-math of the pandemic. Teachers are battling new emerging challenges, from school refusers to rising numbers of students suffering different kinds of anxiety. There is a whole cadre of students who have missed key in-person experiences which has impacted on their ability to socialise comfortably with others. Key milestones in literacy and numeracy are proving more difficult to achieve and society and businesses at large are struggling to reorient to people’s changed habits and attitudes to socialising. To that end Leducate has been required to divert our energies and focus, particularly that of our volunteers and officers, principally towards our core activities: Leducation in schools. This work has fewer visible milestones but is core to delivering the value that we deliver. We are particularly proud of the expansion of our material to cover emerging and interesting areas of law include extremism and to produce more current-affairs focussed content via our LeducateExplains publication. Our team continued to go directly into schools to deliver the materials that we normally pass to teachers; this is an opportunity for us to engage directly with young people and be re-animated by our impact on them. We did this again in Nottingham, attending our now-traditional spot at Moving On Day with an everexpanding team of volunteers in tow.

We have re-focused our delivery structures around regular online meetings in smaller functional teams, and less-frequent in person meetings. These are an opportunity to better engage - with each other, our mission, our impact, and share ideas.

Leducate is powered by its people. In 2023, we directed some of our leadership effort at attracting four exciting new members of the team. These are:

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Physical events are some of the most enjoyable for us. We were very excited to continue our association with the National Justice Museum in London by funding and organising for a group of students from King Solomon Academy (a member of the ARK Trust) to undertake one of their signature mock trials in the resplendent environs of the Royal Courts of Justice. Our Director, Adam, joined them for part of the day.

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Summary of Income and Expenditure

Where our income came from:

Income for the year totalled £277.37. This is directly from donations. This marks a 63% decrease in income over last year.

Where we spent the money:

Total expenses for the year totalled £442.94. This marks an 80% decrease in spending over the previous year. This helped finance the services outlined in our budget and also covered the charity's direct costs for the year.

Financial Commentary

Leducate’s financial year runs from 1st February 2023 to the 31st January 2024. The accounts, and annual report, are therefore prepared to comply with the Charities Act 2011.

The income of Leducate totalled £277.37 for the year. This was raised through donations, most notably from organisations Leducate works with, online services such as Amazon and one off donations.

The level of income remains low for Leducate; however, as a low cost charity with minimal running costs, these are not anticipated to be an issue for the foreseeable future.

Expenditure for the year was £442.94. Expenditure for this year includes the website and associated costs, learning environment and general expenditure to run the charity and increase its awareness.

PUBLIC BENEFIT

The Trustees confirm that they have complied with their duty set out in section 4 of the Charities Act 2011. Further decisions and actions for future activities for the charity have been made with consideration of the Charity Commission’s guidance on public benefit.

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RISK MANAGEMENT

The Trustees recognise their duty to minimise any such risks that would leave the Charity exposed. Leducate’s Risk Management is led by Daniel Ogilvie as Deputy Director and Trustee, who updates the risk register regularly. This is shared with the Trustees and actions are assigned where appropriate. Daniel brings his professional experience in large Civil Service departments to bear on foreseeing and weighing the risks to Leducate. We have identified no new risks to Leducate’s delivery in the reporting period, we have seen a shift in our risk profile towards financial as well as human resource risks.

The Trustees consider Leducate’s key risks for the year are:

In particular, we are conscious that an oversight on behalf of the Directorate and Trustees led to the Jan 2022-Jan 2023 Annual Report being submitted significantly late. We have taken this seriously, escalating it significantly in our assessment of our risks, and have recruited additional support to ensure that this critical obligation is met in a timely manner for 2023.

TRUSTEE AND CONNECTED PERSONS TRANSACTIONS

There were no disclosable transactions or reimbursements this year.

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Structure, Governance and

Management

Trustees:

Adam Kayani (Chair) Daniel Ogilvie (Vice Chair) Olivia English (Secretary)

Directorate:

Adam Kayani (Executive Director)

Daniel Ogilvie (Policy and Research Director) Kieran Pereira (Operations, Finance and Technology Director)

Officers

Olivia English (Education and Compliance Officer) Joseph Myers (Learning and Teaching Officer) Nicoleen Wong (Design Officer) Brittany Buckell (Education Officer) Fran Clark (Leducate Explains Editor) Ammarah Balouch (Events Officer) Anya Myers (Administrative Officer) Amrit Athwal (Research Officer)

Millie Johnson (Strategy and Growth Consultant)

Alex Ridgway (Operations Consultant)

Sachin Varma continued as volunteer interns, contributing substantial time and expertise in the development of our teaching materials.

Constitution:

Leducate is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), incorporated on the 3 . January 2019 in England and Wales, Charity No. 1181403

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Organisation:

The CIO is managed by a board of unpaid trustees. Trustees are appointed by resolution of trustees and selected with regards to skills, knowledge and experience for the effective administration of the CIO. A director is appointed by the board of trustees for the day to day management of the charity, who in turn appoints and chairs the Executive Committee.

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Registered Address 44 Chase Way, London, N14 5DE

Bankers HSBC UK Bank PLC: 1 Centenary Square, Birmingham, B1 1HQ

leducate.co.uk ▪︎ edu.leducate.co.uk

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