Duty Advisers

Training is available once you have been allocated a volunteer duty adviser role.  It is not provided in-house and therefore there is a fee charged for it, see www.no53legal.co.uk for further information (link opens in a new window). 

These posts were previously reserved almost in their entirety to those who were already legally qualified, and therefore additional/specific training was not required.

Training became compulsory following the initial recruitment in May 2011, when it was discovered that volunteers were not able to simply 'hit the ground running'.  In order to continue to let BPTC/LPC students/graduates volunteer with the service, training has been devised to enable them to cope with the steep learning curve of dealing with the multi-level knowledge required to assist clients.

A great deal of work has been put into the training process and it includes two days in class training, followed by two days in court, shadowing duty advisers and being supervised whilst undertaking cases - this is often extended to third and fourth days prior to volunteers taking their own cases by themselves. 

This is time intensive and you will be expected to do quite a lot of reading as well as the guided training.  These are not roles for the faint-hearted as you will be dealing with a broad variety of people, who, whilst they have a repossession hearing in common, will have a broad variety of reasons for ending up in the court, many of which they will require guidance and advice on dealing with.

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