Current developments in legal education in Australia

In this article from the Autumn 2007 issue of Directions Mark Israel and Gary Davis (Flinders University, Australia) report on legal education in Australia, including the possible creation of an Australian UKCLE!

In 1987 the Pearce Report assessed the state of Australian law schools for a commission established by the Commonwealth government, describing an approach to legal education that was both rule oriented and teacher focused. Sixteen years later in 2003 a ‘stocktake’ report commissioned by the Australian Universities Teaching Committee, Learning outcomes and curriculum development in law (PDF file) evaluated the nature of changes in the intervening period, noting that many Australian law schools had adopted theoretically driven and student focused strategies for teaching, despite facing increases in student numbers.

Many law schools have struggled to tackle a long standing failure of students to develop important practical skills in communication and group work, but there have been some successes. For example, the law school at Queensland University of Technology has identified a range of generic and legal skills and embedded these into the curriculum. The 2003 stocktake also noted that the amount of research on law teaching had expanded, and that some law schools were offering graduate programmes in legal education, such as the part time graduate certificate programme at Griffith University in Queensland. However, many law schools were still based on traditional approaches to education.

The quality of teaching in Australia is assessed using student evaluation of teaching questionnaires designed by central university units and by a survey of graduates. The questionnaires help academic supervisors identify poorly performing teachers and unsatisfactory topics, while the surveys give some indication of what students think of their degree programme.

Developments in the university sector

A range of sectoral initiatives have an impact on the quality of law teaching. Universities are now subject to audit by the Australian Universities Quality Agency on a five year cycle. The review panel bases its evaluation of the adequacy of institutions’ quality assurance arrangements in areas of teaching and learning on a review of university documentation, site visits and interviews with staff and students.

In late 2006 the Federal government awarded A$82 million (about £33 million) to 21 universities as a result of competitive funding through its new Learning and Teaching Performance Fund. The purpose of the fund is to reward higher education providers that best demonstrate excellence in learning and teaching, although there has been considerable criticism of the indicators used to assess this. Money for the business, law and economics’ category will be shared among 10 universities. By 2008 A$109 million (£44 million) will be distributed to universities through the Fund.

Finally, in 2006 the Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (now the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, and the equivalent of the UK’s Higher Education Academy) – launched a competitive grants scheme and new national awards for teaching. Two law academics – Mary Heath (Flinders University) and Des Butler (Queensland University of Technology) – received national teaching awards.

Vocationalism

Many Australian law schools promote themselves to potential students as providing practical training in legal skills relevant to the workplace, and vocationalism plays an important part in legal education. Indeed, the 2003 report described the growth in legal skills training as the biggest change in law school curricula in the 1990s. Law placements, local, national and international mooting competitions, legal clinics and practical legal training components are all portrayed as important in making law graduates employable, largely as lawyers. This reflects the shift of focus from what lawyers ‘need to know’ to what lawyers ‘need to be able to do’, a shift heralded and encouraged by the Australian Law Reform Commission.

In some cases the equivalent of the Legal Practice Course in England and Wales has been integrated into the normal, albeit extended, law programme. The Bachelor of Laws and Legal Practice degree offered by Flinders University and the Bachelor of Laws/Diploma of Legal Practice at the University of Newcastle are examples of such qualifications, allowing students to leave university with credentials allowing immediate admission to practice. An alternative approach, found at several law schools including Monash University and the Australian National University, is the inclusion within the university’s programmes of post-LLB practical legal training courses, leading to a Postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice, Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice, or equivalent qualification.

Planning for the future

Legal education in Australia is on the verge of a major development. The Carrick Institute included law in its first round of discipline-based initiatives (DBIs), pilot programmes focused on finding out what curricula and approaches need to be developed to best serve the needs of graduates and the Australian community and sub-communities in the coming decade – see the law project page for full details of progress. The second stage of the DBI initiative consists of the establishment of network hubs, aimed at identifying exemplars of good practice and developing effective means of transfer to other contexts.

Law was chosen for a DBI as an exemplar of a professional discipline. One issue that has cropped up in past attempts to change pedagogic practice in professional disciplines is that good ideas for the development of teaching, assessment and curriculum are resisted by professional and/or accreditation bodies. The law DBI provided an opportunity to determine how best to engage professional bodies actively in professional discipline transformations – to take them ‘on the journey with the academics’ to facilitate better understanding, break down resistance and effect real change. The starting point was the tension between, on the one hand, the professional element of legal education, and, on the other, law’s claim to being an intellectual field worthy of being housed in a university and of being pursued in its own right as an academic field of inquiry.

The substantial proliferation in the number of law schools in Australia in the past two decades has meant that law students no longer all emerge from the top two per cent of secondary school graduates, with ingrained characteristics of self motivation, interest in learning, clarity about goals and focus on study as the top priority. The unifying homogeneity of the past has given way to diversity, evident in the student body, the body of legal educators, the modes of providing and delivering legal education, the multiple end points in terms of graduate careers, the changing nature of legal practice (both domestically and internationally) including legal services becoming an export industry, and the challenges posed by ethical considerations, values, attitudes and community service imperatives.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010