Ali Struthers

Professor

Director of Academic Workload Allocation
Director of School Tasking

Legal education; Widening Access to Law and the Legal Profession; Human Rights; Human Rights Education

School of Law
S1.24, Social Sciences Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

024 765 75306

Scholarship

My principal research interests lie in public legal education, widening access to legal education and the profession, and socio-legal explorations of children’s rights, particularly around human rights in education.

My most recent book on Legal Education in the Classroom: The transformative potential of community engaged teaching and learning (BUP, 2026), co-authored with Suzanne Egan and Deirdre McGillicuddy, touches on key issues around the importance of legal education with young learners and offers practical advice for educators on how to make legal education interesting and engaging for young learners.

I'm also the creator of the hugely successful and pioneering legal outreach project, School Tasking, that now runs across 30 Law Schools in the UK and Ireland and continues to expand internationally.

Bio

Ali obtained her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2016. Prior to this she completed her LLB(Hons) and LLM in Legal Research at the University of Edinburgh. She also gained her Postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice at the University of Edinburgh in 2008 and qualified as a solicitor in Scotland in 2010. From 2015 to 2016, Alison was an Early Career Research Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Study and a Teaching Fellow in the School of Law at Warwick. She is now a Professor in the School of Law. Ali is also a Research Associate and Project Manager for the Centre for Human Rights in Practice, heading up the Centre's work on Human Rights Education, and is the creator of the hugely successful legal outreach project, School Tasking. She became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2025.

Publications Teaching Projects Impact

Policy

Invited paper to feed into the Government's review of the Prevent Strategy: Alison E. C. Struthers, and Diane Webber, 'Critiquing approaches to countering extremism : the fundamental British values problem in English formal schooling' (Government publication 2019)

Public Understanding

'School Tasking': primary outreach project based on the format of the Channel 4 show, Taskmaster. Started as a pilot at Warwick Law School in 2021-22 and is now being run by 26 universities across the UK (2021-present)

'Teaching Fundamental British Values in Primary Schools': project carried out with Warwickshire primary schools involving workshops on teaching Fundamental British Values through a human rights lens (2017)

'Addressing Challenging Issues in the Social Sciences with Young People': interdisciplinary event as part of the Festival of Social Sciences with primary and secondary pupils from widening participation schools involving workshops on challenging topics within the social sciences (2016)

‘Building Blocks for Improving Human Rights Education within Initial Teacher Education in Scotland’ (2015): project considering how best to improve Human Rights Education within Initial Teacher Education in Scotland.

Research Supervision

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD supervisees. However, please ensure that you have a research proposal which corresponds with the University of Warwick School of Law requirements.

I particularly welcome proposals from postgraduate research students in the following areas:

Public Legal Education
Widening access to legal education and the profession
Human Rights Education
Children's Rights
Children's Participation and Empowerment
Children's Privacy

Media

Alison E.C. Struthers, 'Names We Know and Those We Don't: The disconnect between children's rights and school safeguarding' (2022) Child Rights Early Career Researcher Network
Alison E. C. Struthers, 'A human rights solution to our loneliness epidemic?' (2016) Lacuna Magazine
Alison E. C. Struthers, 'Teaching human rights in schools : ‘Who am I to say that democracy is the right way?’' (2016) OUP blog.
Alison E. C. Struthers, 'Faltan 43 : can Human Rights Education heal Mexico’s deep wounds?' (2015) Lacuna Magazine

Social Media

Title	Funder	Award start	Award end
Addressing challenging social science issues with young people	ESRC	02 Nov 2016	01 Dec 2016