Bar National Mock Trial Competition

On Saturday 24th November, 13 students from Tollbar College departed for Leeds Crown Courts for the annual National Bar Mock Trial regional heats in the hope of going through to the national finals.

The students, from years 11, 12 and 13 acted as barristers, defendants, witnesses, court clerks and jurors and presented set cases to practicing judges. Tollbar won all three of their preliminary cases, not because the verdict was guilty each time but because of the way the two barristers – sixth form students – Tom Furneaux and Hannah Cornall presented the cases,  with the help of year 11 students, Alex Hides and Stacey Wardle, and sixth formers Issa Salem and Sophie Watcham, playing the parts of the witnesses. Lauren Bett played an important role as court usher and court clerk, while Marcus Lowe, Melissa Hansen, Josh Hunter, Sian Davies, Rajpreet Kaur and Lucy Partington played the parts of the jurors. They got through to the regional heat final based on points. Tollbar, along with Greenhead College from Huddersfield were the two top scoring colleges at the end of the day out of the 12 that had originally started out and so had to go head-to-head for the final trial that would conclude the day and decide which school would go through to the National Finals.

However, it was down to a flip of a coin to see if Tollbar would be defending or prosecuting in the final case. Greenhead College won the flip and chose to prosecute which gave them the advantage in that case. Unfortunately, Tollbar just loss the final case but they didn’t go home disappointed as they got a lot further than last year, when they didn’t win a single case!

One judge picked out Hannah and praised her on her prosecuting skills and also referred to Alex as Genghis Khan as during one of the cases he was practically cross examining the barrister instead of the other way around!

Well done guys, you did the school proud, but next year we’ll be in the national finals, yes?

Lucy Partington, Year 13