Equalities PLE: Plan and deliver!

Preparations for Advicenow's Progress project has revealed valuable insights into how advice workers view public legal education and a clearer appreciation of what is needed to increase and improve PLE at a local level. These have been recorded in a report following a series of workshops on how to plan and deliver an equality PLE project.

Read the report: Equalities PLE: Plan and deliver ! (74 KB)

Benefits of PLE

Advicenow asked participants what the benefits and impacts might be for delivering PLE as part of their equalities work. There was a long list which included:

• Improving access – being able to reach different\vulnerable clients. PLE benefits more that just the individual client.
• Increasing the profile of the agency – inspiring confidence in it and clarifying its role – breaking down barriers.
• Demystifying the law, ‘myth busting’ to increase understanding.
• Increasing the quality of service delivered as a whole – a rights-based approach ripples through the whole organisation.
• Acting as market research with client groups, and helping to develop social policy work.
• Making clients more willing to complain, and so improving systems and increasing confidence in them.
• Offering agencies the opportunity to generate new projects and additional sources of funding for particular communities.

Interestingly, most of the participants said they were not familiar with the term ‘public legal education’ but discovered that they had been carrying out similar activities but called it something else.

Planning an equalities PLE project

During the workshop, participants looked at what they would need to consider or do for each step when planning and delivering a successful project. Advicenow provided a planning framework to help.

Read: How to plan an equalities PLE project (80 KB)

The framework covered:

• What’s the issue ?
• Know your audience
• What’s your purpose ?
• What will you deliver and how ?
• How will you evaluate it ?

Participants in the workshop came up with many excellent ideas. One of the key themes was the emphasis on partnership working and involving other agencies. The report outlines some project ideas and grouped them into different approaches. They covered:

• Explaining and promoting the issue to a wider audience.
• Work with the problem originator.
• Work with intermediaries.
• Work with the people experiencing the problem directly.
• Work to bring people together.

Resources, skills and support

Participants were finally asked to complete a ‘wish list’ of what they or their agency needed to carryout equalities public legal education. These included:

• Training, including local training on how to do outreach and interact with other sector agencies, access to training the trainer courses, and press and media training.
• Support, including practical support such as an advice line, on line forums, meetings, visits, an email newsletter, consultancy services and access to trainers.
• Materials, included a PLE handbook, a contact list of people providing PLE, examples of good PLE practice\case studies, adaptable training, promotional materials and tools such as templates for public posters, letters, leaflets, flyers, etc.
• Advice including how to evaluate the effectiveness of a project and how to raise funds.
• Research – legal rights intelligence at national, regional and local level to include demographic data, number and rates of cases, etc. Another useful study would be grounded research to identify local discrimination issues.

Advicenow comments that similar issues were raised in a number of different regions. They hope to take forward some of the things that advisers asked for on their ‘wish lists’. Watch out for further updates.

Read about Advicenow's Equalities and discrimination awareness-raising project

Equalities PLE Workshops

Advicenow delivered the workshops at regional discrimination mini-conferences for advisers in 2009 and 2010 in preparation for the Progress3 project. The conferences were run under the Developing Discrimination Advice workstream of the Working Together for Advice project funded by The Big Lottery.

Read about: Working Together for Advice and the Developing discrimination advice workstream

March 2010