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 avoid this disappointment and have as many schools participating as possible, for the first time we held Local Heats in 2025. This worked well and was very successful. Due to this, we will continue to hold Local Heats prior the Grand Final event.
In 2025 we had a total of 32 schools take part with over 200 children from across Greater Manchester, so we achieved our objective of expanding access to more schools!
Local Heats Information:
For the 2026 Local Heats the offence topic will be Cyber Bullying. The Grand Final will be a different script for the offence of Possession of a Bladed Article.
There will be six Local Heats across Greater Manchester with schools from neighbouring boroughs competing for a place in the Grand Final.
The Local Heats will involve schools from: Stockport & Trafford; Rochdale & Oldham, Tameside, Salford & Manchester; Wigan, Bury & Bolton.
The winners and runners up of the Local Heats, together with the winner and runner up of the 2025 Grand Final will go through to the 2026 Grand Final. This will be held towards the end of June 2026, most probably at Hemsley House in Salford.
Invitations with details of the Local Heats locations and dates will be sent out at the end of November 2025. We expect the Local Heats to be completed by Friday 6th March 2026.
Once all invited schools have confirmed attendance in the Local Heats, further information will be sent with a full event timetable, team allocation (Defence or Prosecution) trial script, travel information, and FAQ
If required, a Local Magistrate will be able to come into each school before the event to talk to the children about what happens in a Magistrates Court and run through what will be expected from them during the mock trial. Please let us know if this would be helpful.
We don’t expect the children to be word perfect, but we do expect them to be familiar with their lines and role so that they are able to give a confident performance.
As a provisional guide, for the Local Heats we expect each school to be with us for around 1 hour and 15 minutes, not the full day. Each trial lasts 45 minutes plus time to set up and vacate.
If you have not already expressed an interest and would like your school to take part, please email us at enquiries@gmma-mic.net
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 Grand 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 2026 Grand Final competition event.
