General Terms and Conditions

The Service

• The Child Law Advice Service is a digital first service.
• We have free information pages on child, family and education law on our website. Our online resources are available 24/7. 
• If you have clarifying questions after consulting the resources available you can contact us via our email service.
• Our telephone lines are open from Monday to Friday between the hours of 10am and 4pm. We can offer up to 30 minutes of free legal advice.
• Our webchat service is open Monday to Friday between the hours of 8am and 5.30pm.
• The Service is closed on bank holidays and during the Christmas period.
• Both our telephone lines are extremely busy and you may need to call a number of times in order to get through to an adviser. We strongly recommend emailing us your query.
• Please note we need to take a name, address and telephone number in order to advise in line with our safeguarding policy (see below). We will not be able to provide advice without these details. We will ask for your consent to hold your personal information on our system. We hold details on our system to help improve our service and to access previous case notes if you contact us again in the future to prevent us needing to take the same information which you have already provided. Please note that if you do not consent to us holding your personal information we will still be able to advise if you provide your name, address and telephone number; we will anonymise your case notes so that you cannot be identified when we add them to our system. If you do not consent and later contact us for further advice you will need to provide your details again as the details you have provided previously will not have been saved on our system. Please view Privacy Notice for further details on how we store and use personal information.
• If you require a copy of your notes from your advice call, please email CLAS@coramclc.org.uk to request these. We will ask you to confirm your details prior to sending your notes for security reasons. We cannot send any notes without you requesting via email and without you confirming your details. Once we receive your request and confirmation details, we aim to send your notes to you within one working day. At the end of your webchat service you will have the option to request your transcript so there is no need to request this.
• If you find it difficult to speak English, call us to connect to an interpreter.
• If we refer you to a third party we are not responsible for the service that they provide.
• In the event that a call drops, we will only call you back if it was a fault on our end which caused the call to drop.
• We cannot transfer a call to an adviser of your choosing. All advisers have access to the notes that are held on our system.

What we cannot provide

• We cannot provide our opinion or provide a second opinion.
• We cannot provide advice if you have instructed legal representation to deal with the subject matter you are contacting us in relation to.
• We cannot provide advice if the child lives outside of England.
• We cannot provide legal representation or face-to-face advice.
• We cannot provide advice on any financial issues including child benefit and child maintenance.
• We cannot provide advice on any areas of law outside of Child, Family and Education law- please read through our information pages for details of what we do cover.
• We cannot provide advice on merits of appeals.
• We cannot provide advice to professionals in relation to what you should be doing in your professional capacity. We can only advise professionals if you are calling on behalf of a young person/family and they require advice.
• We cannot provide advice to students in relation to any research.
• We cannot draft court forms, school admission appeals or any other documents

Paid for services

• Our bookable time slots are limited to a period of up to 30 minutes for a cost of £30. The adviser speaking to you will advise if you are due to go over the period and will discuss subsequent payment with you. 
• If you have booked a bookable call back our adviser will try you three times within the allocated time slot. If you do not answer your phone after the third attempt we will e-mail you to advise we have tried to call. Money will not be refunded without agreement of the Manager.
• Please note that we cannot contact you if your phone does not receive withheld numbers. Please provide us with a number that accepts withheld calls. We are unable to call out to International phone numbers and therefore please ensure that the number provided is UK based.
• We request that you only book one call back at a time.
• A call back will cover all child, family and education law issues that Child Law Advice covers. Please read through our guides prior to booking your call back to ensure we do cover this area, and to prepare any questions you may have to get the most out of your call.
• We will email you as soon as possible once we have received your booking request if we believe your matter does fall out of our scope. Therefore please provide as much information as possible in the details box on the call back. If we cannot assist you we will let you know.
• Please note that the adviser will need to take your name, address and telephone number prior to providing advice. Please visit our Privacy Notice for more information.
• If you wish for a refund of your bookable slot please contact the CLAS Manager at CLAS@coramclc.org.uk. Please detail your reason for requesting a refund.
• We can consider a request for a certain adviser to provide the bookable callback. However, it will not always be possible to facilitate this request due to annual leave, shift patterns etc. Please note that we cannot move a booking to accommodate a request for a specific adviser and we cannot issue a refund in these circumstances.
• If you book a call back and it then becomes necessary to rearrange this, please email CLAS@coramclc.org.uk to do this. Please note that it may not be possible to rearrange your call back at the time you require and a list of options will be provided to you. The Child Law Advice Services reserves the right to only rearrange your call back on one occasion and multiple requests may not be facilitated.

Feedback

• If you have any suggestions for our service, please complete the form which can be found HERE.

Safeguarding

As a charity dedicated to promoting and protecting the rights of children and young people we have a dedicated safeguarding policy in place. As such, we request from our callers that they provide us with their full name, address and telephone number in order for us to provide advice. This information is not shared with any third party unless:

• We have concerns that a young person is at risk of harm
• We have a safeguarding concern regarding an adult
• We are ordered to by way of a Court Order

Confidentiality

Coram Children’s Legal Centre offers a confidential service. When a caller provides us with their name, address & phone number it will remain confidential and not be passed on to third parties.

However, in exceptional circumstances confidentiality may be broken if:

• We have concerns that a young person is at risk of harm.
• We have a safeguarding concern regarding an adult.
• We are ordered to by way of a Court Order.

Complaints

The Child Law Advice service tries to meet the highest standards. For this reason, we take any complaints we receive very seriously and encourage people to bring it to our attention if they are dissatisfied with our service. You have the right to complain at any time to the CLAS Manager. For details on how to do so, please view the CLAS complaints policy 2024.