A world class legal education?

In this editorial for the Spring 2009 issue of Directions Julian Webb, UKCLE Director, puts forward three reasons to be cheerful about the current state of legal education plus some suggestions to ensure that law schools continue to develop world class graduates in the future.

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The political and media debates about higher education quality that have been rumbling on since last summer conjure an image of universities visited by the educational equivalent of the plague of locusts – dumbing down, plagiarism and grade inflation run riot, unchecked by toothless and remote quality assurance bodies, who watch as UK universities become beacons of mediocrity.

These concerns, of course, are not unique to law – they impact the whole of higher education. However, they create their own local challenges for law schools, not least by potentially undermining the trust that the professions and, perhaps, the public have in the work that university law schools do, and raising the spectre of greater external regulation as the professions seek to ‘protect’ standards of entry to the profession.

Despite the current fashion for (economic) gloom and despondency, I want to suggest that the health of UK higher and legal education is actually pretty robust. Here are my three reasons to be cheerful.

Reason 1: quality enhancement

If you want a reminder of how far higher education has moved on in the past two decades, look at the first round of Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA) reports and compare with practices that are now routine across the sector. We have moved on substantially and the idea – and practice – of teaching quality enhancement (not just audit) is increasingly well embedded in institutions.

Although there are relatively few quantitative measures that tell us something about the quality of the student experience, such indicators as exist are pretty positive. UK higher education tends to score well against its competitors (including the USA) on measures such as accessibility, retention and employability (see, for example, the Lisbon Council’s “University systems ranking”:http://www.lisboncouncil.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=100&Itemid=28〈=en, 2008). The National Student Survey indicates high levels of satisfaction with the learning experience that students receive – overall 85% of student respondents rate the quality of learning and teaching as good or excellent. The Bradley Review of Australian Higher Education (2008) notes with concern that UK students are about 15 percentage points higher in their overall satisfaction with their university experience, and that the UK continues to outperform Australia on a range of broadly comparable student satisfaction measures.

To be sure, there is more that could still be done to enhance teaching quality, and to provide more reliable metrics and qualitative data, but there is relatively little hard evidence to suggest that the underlying system and structures are not sound. In this context much of the unconsidered criticism of higher education quality over the past few months reflects a degree of, at best, myopia, and at worst economic and cultural vandalism, as we risk undermining our own national and international reputation.

Reason 2: grade inflation – who says?

The evidence that there has been wholesale, deliberate, grade inflation is actually quite tenuous, and we ought to be more robust in saying so. That more high marks are awarded ‘now’ as compared to ‘then’ may well be the case, but that does not, of course, make grade inflation the sole or even primary cause. The issues are much more complex than that. There are many variables that might help explain what seems to be happening, including a wider variety of teaching and assessment methods, more student support, changes to the ways in which degrees are calculated (which may be aimed at providing a fairer reflection of student effort, rather than bumping up marks), and a growing recognition that marking has to be relatively transparent and defensible.

The relative crudity of the current honours classification may also amplify the ‘inflation’ effect. Thus, the assumption that, because we seem to be producing more 2.1s, there is rampant grade inflation overlooks the fact that the upper/lower second borderline runs through the heart of the most densely populated part of the ability distribution. Consequently, it only takes a relatively small increase in average scores to create a large increase in the number of 2.1s awarded. At the very least, more detailed research of this phenomenon is required. What if, as Alfie Kohn (2002) has observed, the real scandal is “why we spent so many years trying to make good students look bad”?

Reason 3: the ‘real’ evidence tells a different story

If we look more qualitatively at what is happening in law schools, we find a richer, more nuanced, picture than any metrics will ever capture. Demand for law remains buoyant, and law schools continue to recruit many of the most academically able students in their institutions.Those students are engaged by engaging teaching and assessment, and are achieving a broader range of educational outcomes than was the case 20 or even ten years ago. There is much relatively traditional teaching that is of good quality, or better, and there are pockets of real innovation in most schools. As a number of commentators have observed, and events such as LILAC and the legal education streams at subject association conferences amply demonstrate, there is today, though still limited, a more regular and mainstream engagement with the scholarship of learning and teaching law, reflected in a steadily growing academic literature.

Looking forward

That is not to say that we can and should be complacent about our achievements, but that we should be robust in arguing that we start from a position of strength, not weakness. In the context of John Denham’s debate on the future of higher education, this is very much a live rather than a hypothetical debate. To frame the future in terms of his own review questions, what should we be seeking to achieve in the next ten to 15 years, and what are the barriers we face?

To help answer those questions Denham commissioned a series of nine reports, published in November 2008, setting out the challenges for the sector. As sensible and largely authoritative contributions to the debate, all nine are to be welcomed. They should be on the reading list of vice chancellors, deans and heads of department everywhere. Three in particular, by Professor Paul Ramsden on the student experience, Professor Christine King on part time studies and Sir Drummond Bone on internationalisation, raise issues of very direct relevance to the development of the law school experience.

The challenge for higher and legal education, I suggest, is essentially the same – to develop graduates who don’t just possess a good knowledge and understanding of their field, but are:

• engaged in the process of learning
• equipped with an international perspective
• have a commitment to public or community service
• are comfortable with complexity
• possess skills that prepare them for an increasingly uncertain and globalised marketplace

So, if we are to develop ‘world class’ graduates in this sense, what will it take? Here are some suggestions.

First, the Ramsden report argues strongly for a radical realignment of undergraduate curricula. Students need greater exposure to inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches, to modules that develop their skills of enquiry and research, that foster international perspectives and ‘inter-cultural fluency’, and above all else, that challenge the learner.

Secondly, we need to ensure that assessment is fit for purpose. Fears about plagiarism must not be allowed to force assessment back into the constraining box of the three hour memory test. But we also need to be more imaginative in developing assessment regimes that are robust, reliable, and capable of enhancing rather than undermining deep learning. Linked to this, data from the National Student Survey suggests that we need in many law schools to develop the formative qualities of assessment by improving feedback mechanisms.

Thirdly, we need to protect and enhance some of the distinctive features of UK higher and legal education, including what Ramsden calls the “intimacy of the pedagogical relationship” – this means trying to protect elements of small group learning, and ensuring that students have adequate access to staff. But it also means resisting the instrumentalisation of learning. In the legal education context, that could mean, among other things, emphasising the strongly normative and values-based dimensions of law, whilst still enabling students to appreciate and deal with the complexity of real world problems.

Lastly, we need to ensure that learning and teaching are adequately supported, recognised and rewarded. This is not something that law schools can do wholly independently of their institutions, and the calls for higher levels of university funding in the Ramsden and Bone reports are unlikely to be welcomed in the current economic climate. Even so, law schools can still do much. It is up to us to create an environment in which teaching is valued rather than regarded as something that gets in the way of research, supported by adequate discipline specific staff development, and in which lecturers are encouraged both to produce scholarship related to teaching and to develop more research led teaching.

Not surprisingly, a number of these themes are picked up quite explicitly in the contents of this issue of Directions, we hope this represents the beginning of a healthy debate about the legal education that we want for tomorrow’s law graduates.

Reference

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• Kohn A (2002) ‘The dangerous myth of grade inflation’ Chronicle of Higher Education 49(11):B7

Last Modified: 9 July 2010