GGSL - the phoenix of legal education

Karen Barton, Paul Maharg, Leo Martin and Alan Paterson say farewell to Glasgow Graduate School of Law and reflect on how it has changed professional legal education in Scotland.

Karen Barton is the co-director (academic) of the Legal Practice Courses at Glasgow Graduate School of Law; Paul Maharg is professor of legal education at Northumbria University, but until recently was professor of law at GGSL; Leo Martin is co-director (professional) of the Legal Practice Courses at GGSL; and Professor Alan Paterson OBE is co-ordinating tutor in Professional Ethics in the Diploma in Legal Practice and director of the Centre for Professional Legal Studies at GGSL.

In 1999 a new species appeared on the legal educational scene in Scotland – the Glasgow Graduate School of Law (GGSL), a graduate school hosted jointly between the Law Schools of the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. The School, opened formally by Donald Dewar in 2000, hosted joint Masters degrees, the Scottish Diploma in Legal Practice (equivalent to the LPC in England and Wales) and the Professional Competence Course (equivalent to the PSC). In the session 2009/10, however, the last joint Diploma will take place and thereafter the GGSL will be no more. Looking back on its record in professional legal education over the last decade, we consider what lessons have been learned for the future evolution of Scottish legal education

In professional education we have tried to create new approaches to learning and the assessment of practice. There have been six main areas of significant improvement that the GGSL was involved in: tutor training, curriculum design, interdisciplinary education, developmental work with the Law Society of Scotland, use of technology in education, and research. In more detail…

1. In Scotland, we use legal practitioners as tutors on our professional programmes. Early on in the GGSL, we knew that establishment of a culture of constant tutor development was essential. Our approach emphasised the necessary balance that needed to be struck between consistency across classes (where there might be 15 or more tutors teaching the same seminar simultaneously), and fostering a tutor’s individuality and voice in contributing his or her valuable experience of practice. In this we followed the line of research into teacher education that emphasised the teacher as artist. We also introduced new forms of tutoring, for example, in Practice Management, where tutors are trained to be more akin to life coaches than academic tutors.
2. There has been constant development of curriculum resources and experimentation with new forms of curriculum design. Traditional lecturing, as a form of education, is now largely a bizarre and strange idea. Webcasts, podcasts and face-to-face surgeries now replace many of them. We have also developed an approach called ‘transactional learning’ – a form of learning based on legal transactions. For students, it consists of active learning through performance in authentic transactions, involving reflection in and on learning, deep collaborative learning, and holistic or process learning, with relevant professional assessment that includes ethical standards.
3. Professional education, by its very nature, is an interdisciplinary endeavour. In the GGSL we worked with a variety of disciplines. In some of our advocacy workshops, for instance, students work with actors and splice this with court practice. To help students learn client-centred interviewing we developed the standardized client initiative, which was adapted from medical education’s standardized patient. Working with the Faculty of Medicine at Dundee University, and with legal educators in the US (including New York Law School and Georgia State University College of Law) we trained lay persons not only to be clients to specific standards, but to assess student and lawyer performance to a high level of reliability.
4. Technology: We’ve developed webcast environments in Civil and Criminal Procedure and in other subjects – the first professional legal course in the UK to do so, and our work has been shared with others, including the College of Law in England & Wales. Recently we’ve trialled interactive modules based on the basic webcast format. Amongst much else we used online simulations extensively in six subjects – Personal Injury, Civil, Conveyancing (Purchase & Sale transactions), Private Client and Practice Management, using a unique application called the SIMulated Professional Learning Environment (SIMPLE) that was developed in-house with funding from JISC and UKCLE.
5. We’ve worked closely with the Law Society of Scotland to develop professional legal education, to improve the Diploma and other aspects of the Society’s educational structures and approaches. This has included being involved in the development of the new professional educational structures, and in the recent formation of a collaborative community of practice.
6. Staff at the GGSL have developed a distinctive body of publications and research about professional legal education – Karen Barton, Michael Hughes, Patricia McKellar, Emma Nicol, Fiona Westwood, and others have all published articles and co-authored work in the field.

None of this could have been possible without the synergy and pooling of resources that happened when Glasgow’s Diploma unit merged with Strathclyde’s back in 1999. Important as the financial resourcing was, the fresh impetus that a new institution gives to efforts to renew educational approaches was also important. It helped us to renew links with the profession, re-think basic approaches to education, bring on board fresh staff, and take risks with new ideas. Innovation has been a hallmark: each item in the list above was (so far as we are aware) a first for Scottish professional legal education.

Above all, the GGSL experiment was a unique collaboration – the first in what must surely be more such collaborative endeavours in Scottish legal education. The politics of all such collaborations will always be complex; but in a world where knowledge-sharing is increasing and where the competition is global, it makes little sense to have the same business and informational structures we had 20 or 50 years ago. And in an age when we have the astonishing examples of peer-production such as Wikipedia (online sharing of information), SourceForge (online sharing of open-source code) and the open educational resource (OER) movement that’s embodied by MIT and our own Open University giving free access to its course content, does it pay for our educational institutions to act as knowledge silos, each competing sharply against the others? Is it not time for our educational institutions to share best practice and resources with each other? We’ll bid farewell to the GGSL in 2010, and eagerly anticipate a time when there is a Universities of Scotland Graduate Law School.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010