Senior Legal Education Officer

About the role

We are looking for an exceptional candidate, someone who can hit the ground running as our Senior Legal Education Officer, working closely with the Director and the rest of our small and dynamic Right to Remain staff team. 

As the Senior Legal Education Officer at Right to Remain, you will be using your in-depth grasp of the historical changes and current developments in the asylum and immigration system and your understanding of how that has affected the communities of people seeking asylum and navigating the immigration system to guide the direction of Right to Remain’s public legal education work. 

You will also be responsible for maintaining, developing, and increasing usage of our highly popular and accessible resources about the asylum and immigration system, most notably the Right to Remain Toolkit. You will deliver interactive workshops on the legal system for people navigating that system as well as professionals and volunteers. You will engage with our network of community groups to ensure that we are apprised of developments on the ground and we are communicating important changes to these support groups. You will also work with the Director to develop and deliver specific public legal education projects. You must have outstanding communication skills and the ability to engage with a wide range of audiences, in a manner that reflects Right to Remain’s mission and values. 

The role will require occasional evening and/or weekend working, for which you will receive time off in lieu (TOIL). The role will also require some travel within the UK. 

Currently, Right to Remain has six staff members. One staff is based in Manchester while the rest of the team is based in London. This post is London-based.

This is a full-time post. We can consider offering it as a part-time, 0.8 FTE post, depending on the successful candidate’s level of experience, skill set, and circumstances.

Please note that you will need to have the right to work in the UK as Right to Remain is unfortunately not in a position to sponsor people for work visas.
 

About Right to Remain     

Right to Remain is a national migration justice organisation, working with hundreds of communities and groups across the UK. As a key anchor organisation within the migration justice movement, we uniquely combine public legal education that democratises knowledge, and facilitates strategic convenings that harness radical solidarity with campaigning and community organising that builds power, further empowering people to establish their right to remain and collectively challenge injustices of the immigration and asylum system. Our vision is a world where everyone can exercise their right to remain where they need to be with dignity and humanity. Our values are agency, people power, mutual aid, solidarity, anti-racism and foregrounding people with lived experience.    

The organisation was founded in 1995 as the National Coalition of Anti Deportation Campaigns, a coalition of grassroots groups fighting against the deportation of their friends, family members, neighbours and co-workers across the UK. Our name changed in 2014 to reflect the expanded scope of the organisation’s work, in response to our community’s changing needs. As the landscape of asylum and migration law, policies and practices grew harsher, it became essential that our community understood the asylum and immigration system better from the very beginning of their journey through the process. There are three reasons for this: in order to support one another to secure immigration status and the right to remain in the UK, to proactively protect the community from the risk of the violence and trauma of detention and deportation and, most importantly, to challenge injustice and human rights abuses. We became a registered charity (1192934) in December 2020.

Since then, the main resource of our public legal education work about the asylum and immigration system, our Right to Remain Toolkit, has become the critical infrastructure for the entire asylum and migration field and beyond. It is the lifeline for many who are stuck in a Kafkaesque system: in 2023/24, it was used by an average of 64,141 unique users online every month. People use the Toolkit to practise for their asylum interviews, gather their own evidence, prepare for their own appeals when they cannot find a lawyer to represent them, and exercise agency by equipping themselves with the knowledge of what could happen to them and the options they have. Many groups, large and small, use it for their staff and volunteer training and for their work at large. Lawyers and students use it as a reference point and other professionals such as youth workers, ESOL teachers, and doctors use it to support people going through the system.

This popularity is due to the fact that our resources, workshops and outreach are accessible, practical and empowering. They are accessible because they are designed specifically for both non-specialists and people going through the system, based on feedback from our community collected over the years. They are practical because they include information about possible steps people can take to improve their chance of securing immigration status and their right to remain in the UK, also based on the tips contributed by our community. And they are empowering because they help people understand what might happen to them at each stage of the process, and how to help prepare for any given scenario, enabling them to take better control of their lives with or without the help of legal advisors and solicitors.

We also demystify legal support. We explain clearly how allies and supporters who are not accredited to give legal advice and who, for this reason, are afraid to help others can still safely provide vital support in our community. While quality legal advice remains scarce, it is vital to scale up the amount of legal support available. This both alleviates the pressure faced by the struggling legal advice sector, and connects people in the system with their supporters, equipping them with knowledge and confidence to fight for the right to remain together, and seek ways to survive the system within their local community. This knowledge of the system will always remain central to our movement.            

In fact, our legal education work goes beyond a simple gesture of information provision. Our work is relational. We carefully and consciously do this in a way that calls for solidarity to bring more people and groups into the movement, focussing on building power in our community.

The Toolkit and our workshops act as a portal through which people can enter the shared struggle for migration justice and start taking collective action to change the system – because you need to understand the system to fight it, just as our community said when we developed the Toolkit over ten years ago. The Toolkit and our public legal education work is therefore the basis of our strategic convening and campaigning, including our experience-led community organising work, These Walls Must Fall. Our refreshed Theory of Change that connects our work building knowledge (public legal education), building radical solidarity (strategic convening) and building power (campaigning and organising) encapsulates the process through which we strive to achieve our vision with our communities.

You can find out more about our organisation on our website and can also read our impact report 2022/23 and annual accounts 2023/24