Details of the internship opportunities

1. Public Law and Human Rights Team Internship – CELC (Remote)

Central England Law Centre is offering an internship working with their Head of Public Law and Human Rights on a range of strategic projects to maximise the impact of work done by the Strategic Public law Clinic in 2020/21 and preparatory development work for projects for 2021/22. These are likely to include:

• a continuation of the Law Centre’s innovative work on promoting awareness of judicial review in local communities through working with community organisations to identify public law issues and how to address them most effectively
• monitoring the development of the Government’s proposals for the reform of judicial review and preparing briefing materials for the Law Centre for both casework practice and external communication purposes
• implementing SPLC project work on the quality of local mental health services, the impact of the pandemic on social care and systemic unfairness in the welfare benefits system within the Law Centre’s practice teams

Internship details: This is a 6-week opportunity offering 18 hours per week (21 June – 30 July 2020)

2. Rights in Peril Project Internship – CELC (Remote)

Background and context: Care Act easements were introduced by the Government as one of the emergency measures under the Coronavirus Act 2020. These allowed local authorities to depart from key legal obligations, which are usually owed to social care service users and carers under the Care Act 2014, if they considered it necessary due to increased pressures on their services and depletion in their capacity to deliver these services during the pandemic.

Several Midlands local authorities including Coventry, Warwickshire, Birmingham and Solihull decided to operate Care Act easements to depart from key duties under the Care Act 2014; including departure from duties to assess needs and provide services to meet needs of disabled adults and carers. The Law Centre are keen to understand how social care service users and carers in the area were actually affected by the operation of easements, by researching whether vulnerable people became to access social care support they needed.

The role: This is a developing project about the aftermath of Care Act “easements” for social care service users and their carers. Working with the law centre’s Rights in Peril team, the intern will help to identify and map local social care service providers in Coventry, Warwickshire, Birmingham and Solihull, to create a Directory of Providers who are likely to have detailed insights into the impact of easements on their client base. This will include day centres, residential respite centres, direct payment brokers and advocacy organisations. The range of work you’ll be undertaking is likely to include legal and factual research on social care services within local authorities (their local offer), formulating Freedom of Information enquires, and collating material in appropriate and useable formats. All work will be done remotely under supervision.

Internship details: This is a 6-week opportunity offering 18 hours per week (21 June – 30 July 2020)

3. Litigants in Person Evaluation Internship – CELC (in-person)

This is an exciting opportunity for an intern to assist with our ‘litigants in person’ project within the employment team at the Law Centre. The work will involve working alongside the monitoring and evaluation lead for the project to gather and analyse feedback from clients alongside their case notes to understand how our advice has enabled them to seek resolution to their employment rights issue. This work is part of a national project funded by the Ministry of Justice and coordinated by the Access to Justice Foundation (https://atjf.org.uk/3-1-million-for-support-to-those-representing-themselves-in-court), The project has a strong learning element which includes understanding to what extent early specialist advice can reduce the use of court and tribunal time to resolve legal issues.

The work will involve helping to develop a client feedback survey, making contact with clients to obtain feedback, compiling case studies from case notes and interviews with clients and analysing case files for evidence of outcomes against our evaluation framework. You will be working alongside an experienced researcher as well as solicitors and caseworkers in the employment team. All client contact work (largely by phone) will need to be undertaken at the offices of the Law Centre (central Coventry) under supervision on Thursdays and Fridays.

The range of work you’ll be involved in is likely to include survey design and survey script creation, designing templates to record and collate information in appropriately structured formats; undertaking surveys with clients by phone, reviewing case files and assessing outcomes achieved against an evaluation framework, compiling case studies and other tasks to support the evaluation and learning of this project.

Internship details: This is a 6-week opportunity (21 June – 30 July 2021) offering 14 hours per week.

4. School Exclusions Project Development – Warwickshire County Council and LinC (Remote or in Person)

The Education Entitlement Team of Warwickshire County Council and Warwick LinC are delighted to offer an exciting opportunity for an intern to assist with the preliminary research, recommendations and set up of a new pilot project that will provide advocacy to pupils and families around school exclusion in Warwickshire. This will involve research, shadowing opportunities with CCEE team working with the LinC team to produce a short report providing key recommendations for a successful pilot.

The following is a summary of some key team activities that you may be asked to shadow:

1. Managed move meetings- where a student is being transferred to another school on a trial basis for 10 weeks max to give a fresh start to avoid exclusion.
2. Meeting with schools (Online or on site depending on COVID restrictions) to discuss children and young people (CYP) who may be at risk of exclusions- this will give an insight into the trends of key reasons that schools may give for considering exclusion. This may be interesting to note if the reasons are be driven around meeting needs of the child or the needs of the school.
3. Meetings with alternative providers to discuss supports packages for CYP who have been permanently excluded or at risk of permanent exclusion – integration process and the agreed exit strategy. This will provide insight into what the quality of provision for CYP is when they get permanently excluded and how their educational outcomes may be impacted.
4. Meetings with behaviour leads in schools to discuss cases- this will provide some insight into the expertise of professionals and how they work collaboratively to avoid exclusions.
5. Panel meetings to re-admit CYP who have been previously permanently excluded or are Hard to place and are being admitted under the Fair Access Protocol. This is the admissions process for CYP who are hard to place and this will be underpinned by the admission code.
6. Shadow at multi-agency meetings in team around the child meetings where applicable and agreed. This will provide insight into the wonder contextual issues that may cause CYP to behave in a given way.
7. Attend team meetings to discuss key issues around Education entitlement e.g. Elective Home education, Children Missing Education, Exclusions, Alternative Provision. This will provide insight to how exclusions links to a series of other key areas which can impact on the entitlement of CYP.

Internship details: This is a 60-hour assignment to run from late June through to end of July. The successful candidate can be remote or in-person, as there is a possibility that some of the meetings could happen in-person subject to Covid restrictions and relevant permissions