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2025-01-31-accounts

Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statement – 2024 25

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Overview

Overview
Message from the Chair and Director 3
About Us 5
Our Strategy 6
Our Work 7
Our Objectives 8
Our Highlights this Year 9
Summary of Income and Expenditure 10
Financial Commentary 10
Risk Management 11
Structure, Governance and Management 12

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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 February 2024 to January 2025.

Over the past year, we have continued to work to educate the public about the law. Schools and teachers continue to face challenges in the shadow of the pandemic and the sharp rise in operating costs across the world have not been kind to the already stretched school budgets and teacher wellbeing. This continues to highlight the importance of our work and, in particular, our proud commitment to supporting free legal education for all.

In this report, we will provide an overview of our achievements, financial performance, and impact over the past year. We are prioritising aggressive growth; both in terms of the number of partner schools and students who can benefit from our materials, and funds to maintain the breadth of our offer that provides such great value to young people. Our lean, scalable model continues to give us confidence to approach more schools and expand our direct delivery this year even beyond previous years.

We are particularly proud to have continued our long-standing partnership with the Redhill Academy Trust of schools in delivering sessions to their students as part of their ‘Moving On Day’. This year has marked an enormous growth in the scale of the event. Where previously it involved approximately 250 students across two school campuses, this year we are proud to have supported the trust in partnering with Nottingham Trent University in order to deliver to all ten trust schools in one day - comprising almost 500 students. For the first time we delivered three separate modules to all of those students in one day, deploying two simultaneous teams of volunteers to deliver our ‘Consent and Healthy Relationships’, ‘Criminal Rights and Responsibilities’ and ‘Life skills’ (covering consumer, debt and housing laws) modules. In fact, we did this twice in the same calendar year - in April 2024 and again in September 2024 - reaching a whopping c.1,600 students in this reporting period.

Moreover, Joseph Myers, our Teaching and Learning Officer, has worked hard to train all of our volunteers in behavioural management, pedagogy and safeguarding to ensure that we produced the best quality of teaching - showcasing our commitment to professional, high quality delivery for our students.

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We were also delighted to continue our work with City Law School’s Pro Bono Society, taking part in panel discussions promoting the benefits of Pro Bono 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 enormous trust shown by the teachers in our partner schools in giving us the opportunity to present to their students year on year - and in such particularly vast numbers this year.

Last year we underwent a root-and-branch reorganisation of the Directorate and pledged to recruit new specialist staff members to take over our financial management as well as to guide our fundraising efforts. I am pleased to say that we have done just that with both of those strategic positions being filled by Jacques Hockey and Bethany Watson. I am entirely confident that their presence will add further assurance for new funders that we are a solid partner with robust, compliant governance beyond our size.

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

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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.

We passionately believe that empowering young people with an understanding of the law will improve their attitudes 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 aims to ultimately 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’ .

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 practice 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

2024 continues to be a year where Leducate expands and 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 four years to ensure that we continue to be a leader in public legal education and considerably expanding our direct delivery to students - to really cement the proof that our delivery model works.

We worked hard to considerably expand our provision of legal education at Moving On Day with our partner school trust Redhill and to ensure our curriculum material is updated and amended to reflect changes to the law. We published regular articles in our Leducate Explains series to continue to develop and grow our library of supplementary legal articles to demystify topical legal subjects for a wider audience.

Leducate also focused this year on ensuring our staff - all volunteers - are able to continue providing the ever high level of work that enables Leducate to run. We continued to develop our commitment to the wellbeing of our officers as well as devising and delivering in-house training to ensure that all of our volunteers were safe, confident and effective when operating within the school environment.

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Our Objectives

Leducate manages its performance over the course of each year by setting objectives. In 2024, 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

2024 was a year working alongside schools in grappling with the renewed social challenges emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic and the ever-changing world of the social-media generation. Teachers are battling now-entrenched social challenges, from school refusers to a rising number of students suffering different kinds of anxiety. New areas of challenging behaviour are emerging from a whole cadre of students who have missed key in-person experiences, which has impacted on their ability to socialise comfortably with others, and others who are exposed to extremist material online. Key milestones in core competencies such as literacy and numeracy are proving more difficult to achieve. In response, Leducate has been focussing our energies towards our core activities: Leducation in schools. We are particularly proud of the considerable expansion of the number of students we have delivered to in this reporting period and continuing to produce a wealth of current-affairs focussed content via our Leducate Explains 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 the largest team of volunteers we have ever deployed - trained, for the first time, in behavioural management (including an ever-present refresher on up-to-date safeguarding protocols).

We have re-focused our internal management structures around a mixture of regular online meetings in smaller functional teams, and purposeful in-person meetings. These are an opportunity to better engage: with each other, our mission, our impact, and the sharing of ideas.

Leducate is powered by its people. In 2024, we specifically recruited three new members of the team. These are:

• Bethany Watson , as Fundraising Officer, to help drive Leducate’s financial growth, strengthen our compliance regime and develop our development and growth strategy into the coming years.

• Jacques Hockey , as Financial Officer, to bring meticulous financial oversight and robust budgetary planning in a key phase of financial expansion for Leducate during this period of planned growth.

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Sadly, we said goodbye to several members of the team this year. We wish Ammarah Balouch (Events Officer), Anya Myers (Administrative Officer), Brittany Buckell (Education Officer) and Millie Johnson (Strategy and Growth Consultant) the very best in their next endeavours and thank them for all their hard work in helping to make Leducate what it is today.

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Summary of Income and Expenditure

Where our income came from:

Income for the year totalled £191.06. This is directly from donations. This marks a 16% decrease in income over last year. This helped finance the services outlined in our budget and also covered the charity's direct costs for the year.

Where we spent the money:

Total expenses for the year totalled £718.83. This marks a 62% increase in spending over the previous year.

Financial Commentary

Leducate’s financial year runs from 1st February 2024 to the 31st January 2025. The accounts, and annual report, are therefore prepared to comply with the Charities Act 2011.

The income of Leducate totalled £191.06 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 £718.83. 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 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 compliance and capacity risks. This reflects success and positive movement in the financial and human resources factors that were highlighted in the previous year, as well as the priority that we place on meeting our reporting and other obligations. We must also recognise that significant external funding inevitably comes with some expectations of reporting and other collaboration, which are both positive and require the commitment of time and effort to meet.

The Trustees consider Leducate's key risks for the year to be:

In particular, we are conscious that transparency and reporting obligations through these Trustee Reports and annual accounts are vital to maintaining our charitable status, and the confidence of our present and future supporters and have set a target to submit reporting within four months of the close of our Jan-Jan reporting period.

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) Bethany Watson (Fundraising Officer) Nicoleen Wong (Design Officer) Fran Clark (Leducate Explains Editor) Jaques Hockey (Finance Officer) Kajal Mavji (Strategy and Policy Officer) Amrit Athwal (Research Officer)

Millie Johnson (Strategy and Growth Consultant)

Alex Ridgway (Operations Consultant)

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

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CONSTITUTION

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

ORGANISATION

The CIO is managed by a board of unpaid trustees. Trustees are appointed by resolution of trustees and selected with regard to skills, knowledge and experience for the effective administration of the CIO. The Director was appointed by the Board of Trustees for the day-to-day management of the charity 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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