Learning in Law Annual Conference 2008: (Dis)integration...designs on the law curriculum

Papers on evolution at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2008:

• Credit where credit is due…the new ILEX Level 3 qualification – Noel Inge and Jenny Pelling (ILEX Tutorial College) read report below.
• The continuing evolution of the Bar Vocational Course – Derek Wood, John Carrier, Valerie Shrimplin (all Bar Standards Board) and James Wakefield (Notthingham Trent University) read report below.
• Back to the future – not rocket science: some thoughts on 20 years of consultation on the BVC and pupillage – Frances Burton (University of the West of England) read full paper
• The LLB – Academic? Vocational? Both? Does it matter? Is evolution in vocational education changing the law degree? – panel session chaired by Amanda Fancourt (UKCLE) read report below

Credit where credit is due…the new ILEX Level 3 qualification

In response to changes to the way legal services and legal education are delivered the Institute of Legal Executives (ILEX) is restructuring its professional qualification as a unitised qualification at Level 3, providing opportunities for students to develop their careers incrementally. Through ILEX students will be able to achieve recognition as specialist legal executive lawyers, or if they do not aspire to professional status, a free standing vocational qualification.

Three forces are driving change at ILEX. The first is the opportunity created by the enactment of the Legal Services Act 2007, meaning that legal executives may choose for the first time to become employers or to form partnerships with other lawyers. These factors fundamentally change the role of the legal executive, which has traditionally been as an employee in a solicitors firm. To ensure that legal executives are properly equipped for this challenge ILEX is introducing skills elements into both stages of its professional qualification. Indeed, the inherent flexibility and breadth of ILEX’s qualification will offer the opportunity to acquire specific skills required for specialist practice by aggregating subjects that might not be available at a university law school.

The second driving force is the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA) proposals for changes to the training contract. One of ILEX’s attractions has been that an integral part of its training route has provided a pathway to the solicitors’ profession by exemption from the training contract for those who have qualified as legal executives before commencing the Legal Practice Course. While the incentive to remain legal executive lawyers will become stronger in the future with rights of audience and partnership opportunities opening up, some legal executives will still want to convert their qualification to become solicitors. To retain the training contract exemption, ILEX will revisit the work-based learning (or qualifying service) element of its qualification. Consultation with the SRA will be particularly important, since ILEX wants to retain the support of employers without over-burdening them with work-based learning assessment schemes that are inflexible and bureaucratic.

The third factor compelling change is the government’s broader approach to skills training, with a greater emphasis on qualification credit accumulation and portability. The new Qualifications and Credit Framework will recognise a variety of student achievements as discrete qualifications, with implications for the way ILEX’s qualification is funded in the further education sector. Through credit accumulation, the new funding arrangements are designed to encourage greater integration between different subject disciplines offered in FE colleges.

The continuing evolution of the Bar Vocational Course

The longstanding monopoly of the Inns of Court School of Law for delivering vocational training for would-be barristers came to an end in 1997, and from 2002, the Bar Vocational Course (BVC) has been delivered by a total of eight ‘providers’. The overall purpose of the BVC is to ensure that students intending to become barristers acquire the skills, knowledge of procedure and evidence, attitudes and competence to prepare them for the more specialised training in the 12 months of pupillage – that is, to bridge the academic and practical stages of training.

The need for a review of the BVC has been recognised for some time, and a great deal of work was carried out in 2005, with extensive consultation with the profession, including the Inns, Circuits, providers, students and other stakeholders. Following the creation of the Bar Standards Board as the regulatory arm of the Bar Council in 2006 a new Education and Training Committee was set up in 2007, taking as a key task a major review of the BVC. A dedicated working group chaired by Derek Wood was set up in October 2007 to consider the work already undertaken and to move towards the defining and delivery of a new BVC nationally by October 2010 – the report of the Wood working group was published in July 2008.

The evolution of the course is inextricably linked to the evolving needs of the profession. It is vital to consider whether the current mode of delivery (or similar) of the BVC is the appropriate one, having regard to research and evaluations recently carried out (such as the Bell review, and work recently undertaken by the Bar Council’s Training for the Bar Committee). In addition, it is important not only to consider the skills and competencies required by prospective barristers – namely the output standards of the course – but also the standards required on input, specifically the entry requirements considered in terms of access to the Bar, entry qualifications, widening participation and enabling those candidates most suitable to the profession to progress, in order to ensure the highest standards of professional practice.

The values of the profession, as instilled in candidates via training, are crucial to the review of the course in order to ensure appropriate quality and standards, building on a critique of existing methodologies and the experience of providers and completers of the course. Other areas for consideration include the changing nature of the profession and the role of transferable skills in the curriculum in relation to common ground that is possibly shared with other legal professions, which are in turn considering how best, in their own reviews of education and training, to bridge the gap between the theoretical and the practical.

The main areas for investigation/review (many of which interlock):

1. The function and purpose of the course – currently the programme was regarded as a bridge between academic study and pupillage. Should it be broadened, given that greater numbers are embarking on the programme and therefore a reducing percentage are able to secure pupillage? Might it become a qualification also recognised as suitable for other legally related employment?
2. Cost – many courses now cost around £13,000, excluding living expenses. The review group was keen to investigate the possibility of financial assistance, for example loan schemes and sponsorship.
3. Admission standards – consider minimum entry standard of 2:1?
4. Course content, balance of knowledge and intellectual challenge, soft skills and ethics.
5. The level achieved in the course – including the debate on whether the course is or should be at Masters level, whether the current grading levels are appropriate, and indeed whether there should be grading at all. Is a competence level at 50% appropriate?

The LLB – Academic? Vocational? Both? Does it matter? Is evolution in vocational education changing the law degree?

In this session a panel, made up of Susan Blake (City University), Richard de Friend (College of Law), Ann Holmes (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Chris Maguire (BPP Law School), each spoke on a question based on the subject of the ‘new’ law degrees emerging from the College of Law, BPP and Huddersfield.

How significant a departure/development are the new degrees?

Susan Blake’s queried what legal education and training are preparing for:

• The profession in 30 years time – electronic courtrooms? Perhaps the justice system will not even be adversarial, but more managed. In 10 years – are we preparing students for the impact of the Legal Services Act? Tesco Law, and even M&S Law, may not necessarily be derogatory terms.
• Where is coherence or overall vision in legal education coming from, at a time when there is such variation in provision? It is doubtful if it is from the professional bodies or from higher education institutions, but perhaps from somewhere like the Learning in Law Annual Conference. There is no single body to provide coherence or vision.
• There is potential for significance in the development of the new degrees – a fast track to practice with a one year Graduate Diploma in Law and then the Legal Practice Course. Do law degrees have to be ‘qualifying’ – a possibility would be to offer a wider range of subjects with an added qualifying element.

In what ways would the new degrees claim to prepare students for practice better than mainstream law degrees?

Richard de Friend outlined the grounds on which it could be claimed that the College of Law degree prepares for immediate progress to practice, and an achievement of graduateness:

• programme outcomes are exclusively expressed in terms of what the professional bodies require (ethics, knowledge and skills)
• modules/stages and progressions are designed such that the learning objectives are achieved
• the programme has been regulated at validation and again through monitoring

Academic law degrees and staff, by contrast, have a variety of objectives and priorities – perhaps for that reason they have tended to resist the professional bodies’ attempts to regulate degrees beyond the Joint statement (PDF file). It is in any case by no means clear that even if more precise objectives were to be set for law degrees that these would encompass the diverse competencies required or prepare students any better for successful practice.

Is there scope for even further integration – for example of all qualification stages? If so, how/when?

Ann Holmes considered the degree from the point of view of where universities can take the lead. She felt that universities have been dragged along by market forces without necessarily having a strategic vision. She asked what the marketplace really wants – are students with exempting degrees really more employable?

Universities are under different pressures from those faced by private providers. There will be a demographic downturn in 2010 – law schools are already restructuring, and it will be 2017 before things pick up. Numbers on the Graduate Diploma in Law and Legal Practice Course are down, and the question will be asked if all programmes are viable.

Ann called for a more holistic approach to the law degree, acknowledging that changes are required. However, universities should not blindly go down the exempting degree route – they need to draw breath and decide what their vision is.

Is all this likely to lead to further (and even greater) differentiation in the law degree market, for example in relation to professional qualification?

Chris Maguire outlined BPP’s perspective as a new degree provider, nervous of its reputation. It will therefore be conservative in approach, while aiming to offer something different and better. The degree could, for example, integrate skills at an earlier stage and focus more on generic thinking skills.

The mixed messages from the professional bodies need addressing – they are calling on the one hand for more knowledge and on the other for more skills/attributes development.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010