Policemen have been looking impossibly young to me for years, but now to my horror some barristers look like they have just stepped out of the school playground, too.

The defence counsel I was watching had a mop of fair hair, the fringe overhanging his eyes and covering his ears, and he had made the sartorial error of wearing a loud checked shirt with a limp apology for a tie. Disconcertingly, he kept referring to his female client as ‘he’, when she was manifestly a young woman.

But we can forgive him this once because, after all, he was only 17 years old.

He was one of the participants in the Bar Mock Trials, a competition organised by the Citizenship Foundation and funded by the Bar Council, the Inns of Court and others. The competition has been running annually since 1991 and each year involves 200 schools and around 3,000 pupils playing prosecutors, defenders, defendants, witnesses, jury members and clerks to the court.

The judge alone is a real judge, resplendent in wig and gown.

Many former participants have gone on to pursue a career in the law, and indeed the judge complimented one of the ‘prosecutors’ that I watched for being the best barrister he had seen in the competition to date.

Could this be the end of the hunt for the holy grail of an aptitude test for entry into the legal profession, I found myself wondering. It’s certainly the best that I have come across yet.

OK, it’s not real life, of course. The 13-person jury (don’t ask) in one trial I watched was given just five minutes to decide its verdict – lunchtime was pressing and also the mayor had dropped in to say hello. The defendant, even if found guilty, was going to get back into the school minibus after the proceedings ended; there was going to be no jail cell on the Isle of Sheppey. The judge, smiling and patient, didn’t excoriate one female counsel for wearing a micro-skirt or another for asking leading questions.

It’s not real life, either, in that legal practice isn’t, alas, all about the excitement of competition and quick resolutions – cases tried and decided in the space of 60 minutes. On the contrary, there are the long hours and eyestrain of poring over law books, leases, contracts and the rest. There are distressing interviews with battered wives, abused children, rapists, murderers and paedophiles. There are 36-hour days as transactions reach a climax. There are disappointments and there is disillusionment when justice, from time to time, is not seen to be done.

That said, every participant in the Bar Mock Trials competition has learned to engage with the law of his or her country. This applies as much to the jury members, to whom the judge explains the concept of ‘reasonable doubt’, as to the counsel who have to stand up and speak in public. For all of them, the law has become something concrete, and no longer something abstract that is just taught in the classroom and has no bearing on their lives.

The competition is also great fun and if you are feeling at all jaundiced about your chosen career in the law, then find a chance to watch these youngsters doing their bit. They are fresh and uninhibited by the mechanics of the law. It’s uplifting.

Just don’t try wearing a micro-skirt before a judge.