Why I Founded Justify
Nick Whiteley, Founder, Justify UK Foundation
When my son's school excluded him permanently, I was not looking for a cause as much as I was looking for answers.
He has ADHD. For a time, he attended a school whose headteacher had formed the view that the way to address this was through punishment. The reasoning, if one can call it that, was that sufficiently consistent consequences would alter the behaviour. What it actually did was compound a child's distress and confirm, day by day, that the institution charged with his education regarded him as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be taught.
When that approach failed, as it was always going to, the school permanently excluded him. The decision arrived as the conclusion of a proper process.
I had no immediate reason to believe otherwise. I am not a lawyer. I had no particular knowledge of education law or the rights of excluded children. I had only a father's conviction that something had gone wrong, and enough determination to start finding out what.
What I found was that the exclusion was unlawful. The process had not been followed correctly. The decision did not meet the standard the law required and the school maintained otherwise. Challenging it cost a great deal, financially and personally. While the law ultimately gave me an account of the wrong, and a measure of accountability, it could not repair what had happened to my son. This distinction matters a lot, and it has shaped everything I have tried to do since.
Such a challenging experience for my family alerted me to the fact that many similar decisions had been imposed on other families and, likely feeling helpless and voiceless, they had accepted them, because they did not know that acceptance was a choice.
I encountered people who had tried to challenge what had been done to them and given up, because the process felt deliberately impenetrable. The assumption, again and again, was that the authority's word was the last word.
Yet it is not the last word.
But that’s only useful information if someone can help you understand why, and what to do about it.
I qualified myself to help. First a paralegal certificate, then a postgraduate diploma in law and a Bachelor of Laws degree. These were tools I acquired in response to a specific problem: people were being failed by public bodies, the law gave them grounds to challenge those failures, and the gap between those two facts was the gap in which Justify needed to exist.
Since founding the charity in 2020, I have worked in court as a McKenzie Friend, a non-legal supporter permitted to assist those who cannot afford representation, and as a lay advocate, supported clients across a wide range of legal areas, and undertaken the investigative research that these cases require. Justify's legal work has even reached the High Court. In one case, a local authority admitted making erroneous decisions in 86 percent of relevant assessments over a two-year period. The legal action that exposed this resulted in an independent review that produced seventeen formal recommendations and a publicly monitored improvement programme. A barrister's analysis of that case described it as an example of what strategic, policy-based judicial review can do to guarantee good governance under the rule of law.
I take some satisfaction in that. But the work is demanding and frequently distressing. The systems involved are large and slow and have learned that most people will not challenge, and even if they do, they won’t or cannot persist. The families who come to Justify have almost always been through a great deal before they arrive.
What Justify provides, beyond the legal support, is presence: the knowledge that someone is standing alongside you in a process that otherwise seems designed to make you feel alone. That, perhaps more than any legal outcome, is what people tell us made a difference. One client, whose case ran across family and criminal law simultaneously, chose to continue with Justify's support even after legal aid was finally granted to her, because of the trust that had been established. Another said, with a directness I have not forgotten, that without this support she did not think she would still be alive.
Those things do not appear in case reports or policy documents of course, but they are the reason the work continues.
Justice is the condition under which people can believe that what is done to them by the institutions of their society will be answerable to some standard beyond those institutions' own convenience. When that condition breaks down, something more than a legal right is lost.
Justify exists to restore it, family by family and case by case.
If you would like to support this work, you can donate at justifyfoundation.org. Every contribution goes directly to legal advocacy and investigative support for families who have nowhere else to turn.
Justify UK Foundation | Registered charity 1188873
Comments