We are delighted to announce that the School Inclusion Project has been shortlisted for The Halsbury Award for Rule of Law, Ollie Persey has been shortlisted for Legal Personality of the Year and the case of Finch v Surrey County Council [2024] UKSC 20 has been shortlisted for Case of the Year at the LexisNexis Legal Awards 2025.
The LexisNexis Legal Awards celebrate excellence across the sector and the winners will be announced at a ceremony on 13th March 2025.
School Inclusion Project – The Halsbury Award for Rule of Law
The Halsbury Award for Rule of Law honours an individual or organisation that has made a significant and sustained impact in promoting and upholding the rule of law. The award celebrates exceptional contributions to advancing fair and just governance, reinforcing the principles of legal integrity, and championing the universal standards of justice.
We are delighted that the School Inclusion Project (‘SIP’) has been shortlisted for the The Halsbury Award for Rule of Law. SIP brings together lawyers, advisers and campaigners with expertise in the field of school exclusions and related issues, to address systemic discrimination in the education system.
SIP is a forum coordinated by the Garden Court Chambers Education Law Team, Communities Empowerment Network, Coram Children’s Legal Centre and Law Centres Network. Most of SIP’s communications are by email (via a GoogleGroup), with meetings throughout the year for SIP members to discuss topical issues. SIP is open to individuals and organisations that support children who have been excluded and/or discriminated against in school.
SIP was launched in July 2021, and now comprises over 200 lawyers working, mostly pro bono, to represent those who have been unfairly excluded from school. The key goals of SIP are to:
- Facilitate referrals for legal representation in school exclusion hearings and related legal proceedings
- Share knowledge and best practice
- Identify and address systemic issues
Racialised minority and SEND children, and others who experience structural oppression, are disproportionately excluded from school. Evidence shows that exclusions harm children’s mental health and long term educational prospects, and that they increase the likelihood of social exclusion and engagement in criminal activity (the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’).
There is systemic discrimination in school exclusions. Government data released this summer showed there were a record 9,400 permanent exclusions in 2022-23, up 45% from 6,500 in 2021-22. Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (‘SEND’), those on free school meals, and Black Caribbean children are among those who are significantly more likely to be permanently excluded. Frontline organisations estimate that 75-80% of the children they represent on a pro bono basis in school exclusion hearings have SEND, and government statistics show that children from Black Caribbean backgrounds are three times more likely to be excluded than their peers.
The consequences of a permanent exclusion are profound. Permanently excluded children and young people are generally sent to a Pupil Referral Unit (‘PRU’) or Alternative Provision. Once outside of mainstream education, they are likely to have poor educational outcomes and/or fall outside of the educational system altogether. A report by the Institute for Public Policy Research found that only “1 per cent of excluded young people achieve five good GCSEs including English and Maths”. Excluded children are also vulnerable to becoming victims of Child Criminal Exploitation (‘CCE’), including County Lines drug running. There is a well-documented PRU-to-prison pipeline, with 85% of children in Young Offender Institutions and 58% of young adults in prison having been permanently excluded from school.
Members of SIP are also challenging the lack of legal aid for school exclusion appeals in the High Court. Legal aid for these appeals, before the Independent Review Panel (‘IRP’), the specialist independent body that reviews the lawfulness of permanent exclusions, is out of scope. Most children and parents either do not apply for an IRP hearing, or appear as litigants in person, in highly complex and emotionally charged proceedings, where the IRP applies judicial review principles.
The legal team have already won a significant concession after the Lord Chancellor amended his guidance for Legal Aid Agency caseworkers to remove a categorical prohibition on ECF being granted based on risk of Article 6 ECHR (the right to a fair hearing) breach. The amendments to the guidance were made in response to this litigation. However, the guidance contains material omissions, including that Article 6 ECHR is engaged in IRP hearings where there are allegations that permanent exclusions are discriminatory. As such, the guidance is an impediment to access to justice.
SIP has already had far reaching positive consequences for those who are unfairly excluded from school, enabling an ‘equality of arms’ in school exclusion hearings. It has also spearheaded positive change by changing the law for the better, through the successful concession awarded by the Lord Chancellor amending guidance for Legal Aid Agency caseworkers. It is hoped that the High Court case will further extend SIP’s success in securing ECF for families challenging exclusions.
Ollie Persey – Legal Personality of the Year
The Legal Personality of the Year award honours an individual (not necessarily with a background or qualification in the law) who has made an outstanding contribution in the legal sphere in the past year. The judges will select a shortlist from the entries based primarily on their achievements in the past 2 years, with the winner being decided by an online vote of the New Law Journal readership.
Ollie Persey has a thriving Claimant-focused judicial review, community care and education law practice, having acted in several of the most significant High Court and appellate cases of the last 12 months. Ollie’s client-focused work in community care law includes age assessments, asylum support, welfare benefits, and health & social care.
Ollie is ranked in both Chambers & Partners and the Legal 500 and won ‘Legal Aid Newcomer of the Year’ at the 2024 Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year Awards. He was a finalist for the ‘John Collins Pro Bono Excellence Award’ at the Bar Pro Bono Awards 2024 and for ‘Junior of the Year’ at the Legal 500 Awards 2022 for work in his core practice areas. In addition to these accolades, the case The Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs v Mr Abubaker Arrbab, in which Ollie was instructed in, won ‘Most Outstanding Impact Award’ at the Citizens Advice Awards 2024.
In his education law practice, he has particular expertise in claims concerning the Equality Act 2010 and the protections owed to marginalised children and young people in accessing education. He also has a very successful Claimant-focused community care practice. He was junior counsel in the landmark litigation that led to the Home Office being required to close its hotels for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
Alongside his very busy practice, Ollie co-convenes Garden Court’s Community Care & Education Law teams and is on the steering committees of the School Inclusion Project and Deaf Legal Network. He organises Legal Action Group’s (LAG) annual Education Law Conference and has been commissioned to write a new toolkit on disability discrimination law to assist parents and families to navigate claims against schools. He is an active trustee of Southwark Law Centre and supports their Access to Education Rights project. Ollie frequently writes and lectures in public law, community care & education law. He is the consultant editor of the latest edition of the highly regarded practitioner text, ‘Halsbury’s Laws on Judicial Review’, and a contributing author of the Legal Action Group textbooks, ‘The Migrant Support Handbook’ and ‘Discrimination in Public Law’.
He also has a high-level public law advisory practice, much of which he does pro bono. For example, his opinion on a complex issue of retained EU law for the National AIDS Trust directly led to the government introducing regulations to remove the ban on HIV+ people who are ‘U=U’ (undetectable = untransmittable) being surrogate parents.
There is no doubt that Ollie goes above and beyond for his clients and the wider access to justice community, not only by dedicating himself to the cases, but also through building a community of specialists to better support his clients and access to justice itself. He is an inspiration to the legal sector and his commitment to his clients is unparalleled. Every solicitor client he has worked with comments on his unwavering perseverance and dedication.
Finch v Surrey County Council [2024] UKSC 20 – Case of the Year
In June 2024, the Supreme Court handed down a ground-breaking landmark judgment in the case of Finch v Surrey County Council, which has had significant ramifications on the future of fossil fuel production in the UK and beyond.
The Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive (and the EIA Regulations 2017 that transposed the Directive into UK law) should be interpreted so as to require a planning authority to assess the downstream greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of a fossil fuel extraction project, before deciding whether to grant planning permission for the development.
The Supreme Court allowed an appeal, brought by Sarah Finch, and quashed a decision by Surrey County Council to grant planning permission for oil extraction for a period of 20 years at a site known as Horse Hill in Surrey.
The Supreme Court’s decision marked the successful end of a five-year legal battle by campaigner Sarah Finch and the Weald Action Group. They have consistently argued throughout the lengthy proceedings that the Council’s failure to assess the downstream GHG emissions that would inevitably arise from the combustion of the oil extracted from Horse Hill was an error of law and rendered its decision to grant planning permission unlawful.
The Supreme Court agreed with Ms Finch (by a majority of three to two) and concluded that it was inevitable that GHG emissions would result from the burning of the oil produced, that those emissions were clearly indirect effects of the development, and that the Council’s failure to assess and consider the impact of those emissions on the climate and global warming was unlawful.
In their clear and well-reasoned judgment, the majority (Supreme Court Justices Leggatt, Kitchen and Rose) placed significant emphasis on the need for decision makers to be provided with full information on the environmental impact of a proposed development, and for there to be public debate before a decision is taken.
In order for the process to have the necessary democratic legitimacy, the public must be able to participate in environmental decision making and be informed of the environmental impacts of a proposed development, so that they can comment upon them before a decision is made to grant planning permission; after all, as the Justices noted, ‘You can only care about what you know about.’
The majority rejected a number of the arguments raised by the Council, Horse Hill Development Ltd and the Secretary of State, including the unevidenced suggestion that if oil was not extracted from Horse Hill, it would simply be substituted by oil produced in another location.
The majority also noted that there was no principle that ‘if environmental harm is exported it may be ignored’. In doing so, the Justices noted that ‘Climate change is a global problem precisely because there is no correlation between where GHGs are released and where climate change is felt ’and that ‘the effect of the combustion emissions does not depend on where they occur’.
This ground-breaking judgment will have wide ramifications in the UK and beyond its borders. Planning authorities will now have to assess and take into account the downstream GHG emissions arising from fossil fuel extraction when determining whether to grant permission for such development.
The judgment is likely to influence decisions taken in EU countries where the EIA Directive is applicable. The Supreme Court’s decision is the first of an apex court which addresses the interpretation of the EIA Directive in the context of fossil fuel extraction, and is likely to be followed by courts in other jurisdictions.
The judgment is also likely to be given significant weight by judges determining the same issue in countries beyond the EU and so could have an effect on the future of fossil fuel extraction across the globe.
Marc Willers KC of Garden Court Chambers represented Sarah Finch, together with Estelle Dehon KC and Ruchi Parekh of Cornerstone Barristers. They were instructed by Rowan Smith, Carol Day and Julia Eriksen of Leigh Day solicitors. Garden Court Chambers is jointly shortlisted alongside Cornerstone Barristers and Leigh Day for this award.