YEAR 6 MOCK TRIAL COMPETITION 2025
About the competition:
The competition involves the children acting out a trial in which they play all the major roles: Magistrates', solicitors, defendants, witnesses, and court officials. They will be supported by volunteer Magistrates' from the Greater Manchester Magistrates Association.
The competition provides a chance for the pupils to work as a team, demonstrate their verbal reasoning abilities, and gain valuable experience and confidence in speaking in public.
Due to the overwhelming success of these competitions, in previous years we have received many more requests from schools to participate than we could accommodate.
To try and avoid this disappointment and have as many schools participating as possible, for the 2025 competition we are holding Local Heats prior to a Grand Final competition.
Local Heats Information:
The local heats are being organised between schools within all ten of the Greater Manchester boroughs and held at local schools within the boroughs as much as possible. The winning schools and runners up from these heats, together with the winning and runner up schools from the 2024 competition, will go forward to the Grand Final. The final will be held in June at Hemsley House, as in previous years.
For the 2025 Local Heats the offence topic will be Cyber Bullying. The Grand Final will use a different script for the offence of Possession of a Bladed Article.
For the Local Heats we expect the school to be with us for around 1 hour and 15 minutes, not the full day. Each trial lasts 45 minutes, plus time to arrive, set up and vacate.
If required, a local Magistrate will be able to come into each school before the event to talk to the students about what happens in a Magistrates Court and run through what will be expected from them during the mock trial.
Grand Final Competition:
At the Grand Final there will be a certificate of attendance for all participants and prizes and trophies for the winning teams. There will also be a prize for Outstanding Individual Performance in each team. For the Grand Final there will also be the rolls of Court Artist and Court Reporter. For further information about the Court Reporter and Court Artist roles, please see the relevant page using this link ... Court Artist and Reporters ...
We hope that The High Sheriff of Greater Manchester will again be able to attend to personally meet the children and present the awards. Court Artist and Court Reporter awards will be presented after the event.
At the final we expect to organise other activities like those previously arranged, to further engage the students and reinforce key messages around keeping safe in the community. There were exhibits and activities organised by Greater Manchester Police, Travel Safe, British Transport Police and Early Break. In addition, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service provided a fire engine and crew to talk to the pupils in the yard on all aspects of fire safety.
In addition to this, last year we held a Knives: Choices and Consequences interactive quiz workshop for all the students, which fitted in with the mock trial topic of Possession of a Bladed Article in a public place.
We are planning to have similar additional activities available for the students at the 2025 Grand Final competition event.
