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 2025 competition we held Local Heats prior to a Grand Final competition. This worked well and was very successful. Due to this, we will continue to hold Local Heats prior the Grand Final event.
Local Heats Information:
For the 2025 Local Heats the offence topic was Cyber Bullying. The Grand Final was a different script for the offence of Possession of a Bladed Article.
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 final. In previous years we have had 16 schools in the Grand Final and expect to have the same in 2026. This is the most we can accommodate on the day.
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!
Further details about the Local Heats will be available towards the end of 2025.
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 2026 Grand Final competition event.
