The School of Law has a long standing relationship with Resolve, a Reading based Community Mediation organisation.  Resolve trains approximately 40 law students each year in community mediation skills, and many trained students go on to assist in Resolve based activities. In 2018 it was decided to invite three Resolve trained students to form a team to represent Reading in the Annual Student Mediation competition. To enable the students to obtain additional skills in professional mediation BDB Pitmans’ Reading Office agreed to provide six sessions of additional mediation training after hours in their Reading offices.  In addition to the three Resolve students (Alyana Rahman, Idara Etiebet and Clara Tate) four other final year students, who had not undertaken mediation training, joined the class (Beatrice Alamu, Rebecca Walker, Keitlina Gashi and Nur Diana Bini Aziz). The training was provided by Reading law alumnus Tim Clark and his partner David Gwillim. The students worked through previous competition problems, perfecting their role playing skills and increasingly became effective and confident mediators. It is a tribute to both students and their instructors that the classes had a 100% attendance rate and never finished before 7:30 pm.

The team of three attended the national mediation competition over two days in January at the University of the West of England in Bristol. They took part in three mediations with members of the team acting as either as a client or a mediator. Although the team was not one of the winners, it was a fantastic experience for all concerned, as can be seen from the following comments by the students.

“I have noticed a great difference in my mediation and role-playing skills and I could not be more appreciative of this growth”. “The training was beyond what I expected”. “The skills and experience i have got from this Programme are precious and I have built so much more confidence and improved my public speaking skills”. “I really appreciate the time, resources and encouragement Tim and David provided”.

The School of Law is extremely grateful to BDB Pitmans for sponsoring this competition and in particular to Tim Clark and David Gwillim for providing such friendly and structured training to this group of final year students.