The Advocate's Gateway Toolkits

These toolkits provide advocates with general good practice guidance when preparing for trial in cases involving a witness or a defendant with communication needs.

Information about specific communication abilities and needs should always be sought from the individual witness or defendant, or their family/ support worker/ teachers etc.

Using the Toolkits

Each toolkit contains the following statement "Questioning that contravenes principles for obtaining accurate information from a witness by exploiting his or her developmental limitations is not conducive to a fair trial and would contravene the Codes of Conduct".

The toolkits also provide:

links to source material
trial transcript questions, with suggestions about how they might be improved
highlighted examples of good practice and poor practice, and
lists of references, contributors and reviewers

TAG TOOLKITS

The Toolkits are copyrighted materials. Please refer to the terms of use.

Toolkit 1: Ground Rules Hearings

Please note that if you intend to use The Advocate’s Gateway materials or toolkits in order to assist with communication needs, for anything other than personal, non-commercial use, you must obtain permission in advance from The Advocate’s Gateway.

Accessible (screen reader ready) word versions of all toolkits available on this page in pdf format can be provided upon request.

Should you need such versions, please contact us via theadvocatesgateway@gmail.com