Student Mediation Competition Winners 2020
The annual UK Student Mediation Competition is designed to help law students understand the value of resolving disputes through, and to develop their skills in, mediation, mediation techniques and the mediation process in general, so that they might apply their knowledge and skills in these areas in the course of their personal and professional lives. The competition is in its 13th year and presents a great opportunity for students to display their mediation skills.
Teams of three students are judged over three rounds with each team member performing two mediations as a co-mediator. In each round, competitor institutions have two team members mediating and in the same mediation round the other team member, not co-mediating performs the role of a party coming to mediation.
This year the competition was hosted by the University of Glasgow, and the Canterbury Christ Church University team comprising final year Law students Hannah Williams, Megan Ryan, Claudine Weir and Zita Nalatche Mendes beat off strong opposition, from teams representing 14 Law Schools across the UK, to win the competition. Our student mediators beat the second placed team of Queen’s Belfast by nearly 100 points. This is a significant achievement given that many of the other teams (including those placed in the top four) comprised postgraduate students. Hannah Williams and Megan Ryan are to be particularly commended as they were the highest ranked individual mediators.
Ben Waters, Senior Lecturer in Law at Canterbury Christ Church University, said: ”Not only are these competitions a great opportunity for students to put into practice valuable transferable skills, but they also help to raise the profile of competing universities and undoubtedly enrich the all-round student experience. Our students are a credit to both the School of Law, Criminal Justice & Policing and University and I am sure that you will want to join me in congratulating them all for all the hard work they invested in both preparing for and competing in the competition.”
Competition tradition requires that the winning team’s institution hosts the competition in the following year and we very much look forward to bringing the competition to Canterbury and hosting in 2021.