Asylum Guides National Scaling

Grant: £70,828
June 20, 2018

Scaling up the delivery of the Asylum Guides project, previously supported by TLEF, increasing the ability of newly arrived people to navigate the asylum process, and to feed lessons on systemic challenges into wider policy work.

Frontline Immigration Project: Increasing access to immigration advice for migrants

Grant: £80,000
June 21, 2017

The Frontline Immigration Advice Project is significantly improving access to quality, publicly-available OISC-accredited immigration advice for asylum seekers, refugees and migrants who have complex immigration issues. It is the first nationally-delivered project to do this, with a specific and dedicated focus on organisational capacity-building to secure OISC registration; improved advice coordination; and the sharing and adoption of best practice. The acute scarcity of this advice means thousands of vulnerable people are unable to attain justice, safety and dignity (Clayton, Models of Immigration Advice, 2015).

The project is empowering frontline support organisations in key sectors to increase the delivery of quality, sustainable immigration advice through an innovative capacity building programme, involving training, coaching, case-sharing, organisational development, and regional coordination. All geographical areas where there is asylum dispersal and migrant communities have been reached, engaging 86 individual organisations nationally to date. Year 2 and 3 will deliver tailored training packages and capacity building support to provide more routes to acquiring immigration advice registration, extend organisational support to offer an e-learning platform and strengthen regional immigration advice coordination.

Future Advice - Increasing access to immigration and asylum advice

Grant: £50,000
July 6, 2016

The Asylum Guides Project

Grant: £148,638
November 10, 2015

The Project will empower people claiming asylum in North West England to engage meaningfully with the asylum process by providing them with legal literacy on the UK asylum system.

Highly skilled volunteer Asylum Guides, located in organisations trusted by the client group, will provide people seeking asylum with a legal literacy programme. They will meet their clients in person at key stages in their journey through the asylum process to understand and prepare for their interactions with the Home Office - from arrival until their case is concluded.

Exhausted by the asylum seeking experience, and ill-prepared to navigate the process alone, this staged, relational legal literacy approach will engage this population to feel more engaged with their claim and have a better understanding of what is happening at each stage of the process. Moreover, the Solihull Early Advice Pilot showed, they are more likely to accept the outcome of their asylum claim if they have had the process explained to them and are able to participate in the decision making with the support of a trained advisor.

Asylum Guides will be trained using digital educational tools thus ensuring that this is an accessible, scalable public law educational model.