Paula, a 13-year-old schoolgirl, was terrified when she entered the busy office in Glasgow and sat across the desk from a man she did not know. She had not come to meet the headteacher of a new school, education officials or even a social worker. She was there to see her lawyer.

Partially sighted, Paula had been subjected to systematic bullying so severe that her mother was keeping her home from school in Edinburgh. After fruitless appeals to social workers and the local education department, she and her mother Jacqueline Wallace had decided there was no alternative but to take the fight to the officials - and that meant hiring an aggressive solicitor.

Litigation is a draining, nerve-wracking, confusing, not to mention expensive, experience for anyone - let alone a child. Yet Paula is just one of a growing band of modern children who may be too young to drink, drive or marry, but are not too young to sue. From claiming compensation for bullying to challenging care orders and suing parents for university fees, children are using the legal aid system to become the litigants of today, let alone the claimants of the future.

"Paula was absolutely petrified," her mother admits. "She was scared in case something happened to me as the social workers were threatening to take me to court for keeping her home. I did not know who to turn to until a neighbour saw an article in a newspaper about another girl in a similar situation who had gone to a lawyer.

"I took it home and showed it to Paula and she just started panicking. She said: 'Do you really want to do this sort of thing?'"

The outcome, though, has been positive, even if it took several stressful months of wrangling. The education authority eventually found Paula a place at a small, private school that suited her needs, and picked up the bill for the fees. But the legal action does not end there. Paula, now approaching the end of her schooling, is planning to sue the education authority for damages. Jacqueline is adamant that such action is justified, not the manifestation of a growing "compensation culture" that is becoming so ingrained that even juveniles are encouraged to seek retribution through the courts for their everyday problems.

The compensation culture debate has even led the government to pledge legislation in the new parliament to crack down on spurious claims, with Lord Falconer, the lord chancellor, insisting "where there is no blame, there should be no claim".

Jacqueline is sure that there is some blame in her daughter's case: "Paula was without education for 14 months, and someone should pay for that. She says 'they ignored me but now they should have to listen to me.'"

It is Paula that is, technically, the client instructing the solicitor and so any legal action is taken in her name. But Jacqueline acknowledges that Paula could never have made the decision to go to law and was, indeed, terrified at the prospect. Cameron Fyfe, Paula's solicitor, says it is not uncommon for the parent to be the driving force behind legal action in their child's name after exhausting all other official channels to try to solve their problem. But increasingly, too, more children, many around the ages of 14 or 15, are coming to see him of their own accord.

"A few years back this was almost unheard of, but it's much more prevalent now." he says. "About 30 children have instructed me to sue local education authorities because they were not protected against bullies at school."

Fyfe, a partner at Ross Harper solicitors in Glasgow, has become something of a celebrity in the emerging world of children's legal actions. His name is attached to many of the high-profile cases that have attracted attention in Scotland, which has so far led the way in kids' actions. He currently has about 50 young clients on his books, mostly bullying-related with about a dozen parental maintenance cases. The outcome of many of the bullying compensation claims is still far from certain and large payouts are by no means guaranteed. Regardless of their success, though, he says the trend for child instructions is undeniable,

Fyfe says claiming maintenance for continuing education is an important issue because the Child Support Agency stops enforcing against absent parents when the child reaches 16, but many find they have no means of support to continue their studies. There are a variety of other cases, too.

In one, a girl wanted to have inoculations offered at her school though her parents were opposed. When the family came to Fyfe with their dispute he advised them that the law favoured the child's wishes, and the parents relented. In another, a girl sought to take action against her school, arguing that the detentions she was given were in breach of the human rights act. The school decided not to continue with detentions rather than contest the claim.

In Scotland, children are able to instruct a solicitor as long as they are of "sufficient maturity and understanding". That is generally taken to be about 12 years old, though there are indications that courts are prepared to take into account the wishes of children even younger. In family cases, it is not unknown for a judge to take a child as young as 10 into his study to canvass the youngster's opinions on access to a parent.

John Fotheringham, a solicitor at law firm Ross and Connel in Dunfermline and a spokesman on family law for the Law Society of Scotland, says: "The [age] trend has been downwards to allow more children to express a view if they want to. Of course, most children do not want to express a view."

Fotheringham suggests one reason for the greater development of child legal actions in Scotland than England and Wales could be differences between the countries' legal aid systems. Access to legal aid in England and Wales is increasingly being tightened as the government attempts to keep a lid on the total bill that has spiralled above £2bn a year. However, Fotheringham says: "The legal aid board in Scotland is not too unwilling to allow children to be represented... It takes the view that the child should be a player rather than a football."

Legal aid figures, however, show a general overall decline in child legal actions in Scotland and England. The figures can be misleading, though, since the total number of publicly funded civil cases in England and Wales in particular has fallen rapidly in recent years because of the squeeze on the legal aid budget. To complicate matters, many of the people under the age of 18 involved in family cases are actually the parent, not the child.

In Scotland, there were 412 successful applications from under-18s for civil legal aid in 2003-04. Of those, the Scottish Legal Aid Board said 246 were family cases while 108 were compensation claims. In England and Wales, publicly funded non-family civil actions in the name of children - the biggest category of which was clinical negligence claims - have fallen from 5,822 in 2000-2001 to 2,645 in 2004-05. The total for non-family civil cases has also dropped rapidly, leaving the percentage of cases involving children largely static at around 12 per cent.

Nevertheless in England, too, there are children who are more familiar with the local law courts than the neighbourhood tennis courts. Take, for example, the case of Shabina Begum, the 16-year-old Muslim schoolgirl who went all the way to the Court of Appeal recently to insist on her right to wear a jilbab, the traditional full-length dress that conceals the shape of a woman's arms and legs, at Denbigh High School, in Luton. The case, in which Miss Begum, whose parents are dead, was represented by Cherie Booth QC, the prime minister's wife, reportedly cost £70,000 in legal aid fees.

Legal aid changes in the late 1980s made it possible for children to pursue legal actions when their parents would not qualify for publicly funded advice. At the time it was considered an "enlightened change", mostly to help children that were injured or disabled, according to Andrew Lockley, head of public law at Irwin Mitchell.

Henrietta Spink has attracted attention with one such long-running battle with the social services department of Wandsworth Council, over the costs of equipment needed for the care of her two severely disabled children, Henry and Freddie, who need constant supervision. She argued that the means testing system used by the council was unfair and the help provided by social services had been inadequate, claiming the family had run up massive debts and was in danger of losing its house.

Lockley says most of the child cases that come to him involve personal injury or clinical negligence, but there is a growing number of educational cases involving bullying or children excluded from school. He has even represented a 14-year-old boy in an environmental challenge to a planning decision. Liam, who had been studying environmental issues at school, came to Lockley incensed at a decision to site a methane-producing plant on a playing field in Barnsley. He was determined to challenge the decision despite his tender years and insisted on taking the issue to court, though the challenge was thrown out by a judge.

The case was a point of principle for Liam, and that is often a driving factor in cases involving children, adds Lockley. "It is about rights not compensation," he said. "Children are not compensation oriented."

A "litigation friend", typically a parent or guardian, is often needed to act in the interests of young children, in England and Wales, and in spite of the media-grabbing compensation cases, the majority of legal issues faced by children are inevitably family-related. For many children, particularly those in care who do not have parents on hand to fight for them, the only way for them to make their voice heard is through legal channels.

The Association of Lawyers for Children aims to promote the interests of young people through the law.

Barbara Hopkin, its spokesperson and a solicitor at Hopkin Murray Beskine in north London, says her caseload is quite different from the type of compensation claims that have hit the headlines. It often involves children in care who want to discharge their care orders or change their residence, or who simply want contact with an absent parent or siblings.

"Children in care often regret the fact that they have not had contact with their siblings," she says.

Many are unconvinced, though, that granting legal aid really does turn the child into a "player". The child may instruct the solicitor in name, they say, but in too many cases there is a parent lurking behind, pulling the strings, perhaps as a way to attack a former partner, restrict access to their child or elicit more cash.

Actions must be in the name of the child in order to qualify for legal aid. Since children generally have no income or assets - with the exception of a small minority with trust funds - their legal bills are paid by the state, regardless of their parents' wealth.

The anecdotal growth in child legal cases can be attributed to manipulative parents, the argument goes, who are abusing the system to obtain legal aid to fund spurious damages claims for their battles with former spouses. "That is patently a risk," Fotheringham acknowledges, "but it is not a big risk because we are aware of it and so it doesn't really happen." He insists that the possibility of a parent hiding behind a child's legal aid certificate is assessed in every case so that legal aid is granted only if it is truly in the child's best interests.

There are also wider concerns about the effects on society of teaching children that problems must have a legal solution. Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of the book Paranoid Parenting, has studied what he calls the "pathologising of risk-taking by children". He says: "My main concern is with the way in which informal relationships that children have with other children, adults and teachers are becoming increasingly formalised."

A functioning society, he argues, should teach its children how to handle the experiences that come as part of the "give and take of everyday life", so that painful experiences can become formative and provide an ability to create informal solutions to our problems. Instead, by creating "pseudo-legal relationships", the problems that children confront become subject to "institutional type solutions". That in turn erodes children's sense of independence and makes them more likely to rely on institutional solutions to their problems in the future, rather than working things out for themselves.

Far from empowering children, that has the effect of disempowering them, Furedi insists. "At the risk of being unpopular, the concept of children's rights [is misleading]. It's not children who exercise these rights, it is adults exercising them. It's an adult agenda."

He believes that bullying is a classic example of pseudo-legalistic thinking. "By discussing bullying as a routine problem we have lost the ability to distinguish between the 95 per cent of bullying that is just kids being kids and the extreme cases where there is reason for adult intervention."

Not surprisingly, most of the children's lawyers disagree. They point to citizenship education in schools, which is giving children a better awareness of the workings of modern society. So are the children who walk into a lawyer's office often truly clued-up about their legal rights? "God, yes", splutters Cameron Fyfe, who is often surprised by how legally savvy his young clients are.

"It's hard to argue that children should be kept ignorant of the law," he says. "People [of any age] should be told about their rights and be allowed to enforce them. Anyone that wants to stop that is undemocratic. Actually, I have often wondered why law is never taught in school."

Andrew Lockley agrees that children are more aware of the law today, but insists that few would even choose to go to a solicitor without some kind of adult prompting. "No kid of 14 is going to think 'I'm going to see my brief.' They just don't do it, unless the thought is put into their head."

Yet in a society that is increasingly comfortable with the use of lawyers, when more children are to be seen bringing legal actions, and when parents are left feeling that the law is their last, best option in fighting for the rights of their children, that thought is likely to be put into their heads with increasing frequency.

Jacqueline Wallace says: "I would certainly advise [anyone in a similar situation] to go to a solicitor because going through the proper channels is a waste of time.

"And I would say go straight away, not as a last resort. I wish I had done it in the first place."

Bob Sherwood is the FT's legal correspondent