Building on new foundations

Truro College is running one of the first foundation degrees in law. In this article from the Autumn 2003 issue of Directions the law team at the college reflect on their experiences in setting up the degree and review student progress over the first year of operation.

Truro College introduced a foundation degree in law in September 2002. Validated by and run in partnership with the University of Plymouth, the programme has now completed its first academic year.

Foundation degrees are new employment related, higher education qualifications, designed to equip students with the higher level skills that employers are crying out for. They are bringing higher education and business closer together to meet the needs of employers.Work on converting our existing HND in Legal Studies into a foundation degree in law started in early 2002. In order to get the programme validated we needed to produce two documents – a student handbook setting out details of the college, the course and the individual modules, and an approval document demonstrating, amongst other things, market research to prove the need for the course in our locality. It was undoubtedly the latter that took the most work, although writing the modules themselves was also very time consuming.

In order to ensure our programme met the required outcomes (DfES requires that “(o)n completion of a foundation degree, there is progression to other professional qualifications and also to a full honours degree on either a full or part time basis”) it was essential that the course met the needs of both local employers and the university. Market research was undertaken in an eclectic fashion, hampered by time constraints and teaching responsibilities. However, by employing a variety of methods – including face-to-face and telephone interviews and questionnaires sent out by post and chased up on the phone – we were able to gather sufficient information to convince both ourselves and the university’s validation panel that the programme we had devised was both necessary and relevant to local needs.

This research stage also gave us the idea of forming a focus group. We recognised that foundation degrees were not ‘just another’ academic qualification and that the government required there to be on-going contacts with and input from local employers. We had established useful links with such individuals, and we felt it would be useful – to us, them and our future students – if we could maintain these relationships over the lifetime of the programme.

Our focus group contains ten members drawn from a range of backgrounds, as we aim to provide our students with a variety of potential employment and progression routes. In addition to solicitors (from both private practice and local government) and a legal executive, we receive input from a business/management consultant, legal practice manager, bank manager and careers adviser, to name just a few. The first meeting was a real success and went on for much longer than we had anticipated! We have been amazed at the genuine interest that the members have shown in the programme, and the suggestions and assistance that we have received from them have been invaluable. Establishing a focus group is something that we would wholeheartedly recommend to all other institutions thinking of starting a foundation degree.

We have also had a great deal of assistance from the university itself. Our main contact in the law school supported our programme from the initial planning stages and helped us to ‘shape’ our modules to ensure the content was sufficient to meet their needs. Our programme feeds into the third year of the BSc (Hons) Law with Business degree at Plymouth. To ensure those students who wish to take up this route have the necessary skills and knowledge to succeed we needed to enhance the business-based content of our programme. We also adapted our initial plans for the subject matter of the law modules to ensure they did not overlap with any of the law modules to be studied at Plymouth and formulated a brand new pair of modules to provide the students with a broad based introduction to concepts of legal liability and the underlying principles of law.

Unfortunately, the BSc is not a qualifying law degree, and accelerated progression onto such a course cannot be achieved until the Law Society and Bar Council approve this option. All students were made aware of this ‘limitation’ and the implications for further training from the time they applied to join the course. However, at this stage all of our first cohort want to feed into the third year of the Plymouth degree, with over half intending to continue professional training.

There are 12 students in the group, with three mature students, and all have integrated and ‘bonded’ well. All completed their first year successfully and have shown positive development, with a 100% retention rate to date. The programme is being run on a full time basis, although teaching has been consolidated across three days, allowing the students the remainder of the week to accommodate further study, part time work, child care commitments etc.

The course has been staffed by existing lecturers from the college’s business studies and law department. All of these lecturers also teach on a range of other FE (and some HE) courses within the college. Teaching on the foundation degree has complemented these other obligations well, providing us with enjoyable new challenges and experiences.

Year 1 consists of 160 credits, 40 of which are dedicated to providing the Study Skills and Work-Based Learning modules, compulsory components in the first year of any foundation degree. This first year has run relatively well, with few hitches, but already we have learnt several important lessons. We have decided to swap around the Introduction to EU Law module with Legal Writing, as it will be easier for students to deal with a complex subject like EU Law with the benefit of having already studied some law. We have also opted to alter some of the assessment requirements. For two modules coursework consisted of five ‘mini’ tasks, each to be submitted separately. For the next cohort we have decided to integrate these pieces into one larger piece of coursework, made up of smaller elements. This should be easier for the students to cope with in terms of meeting deadlines and juggling workloads.

The two modules with which we were initially most concerned – Study Skills and Work-Based Learning – have run extremely smoothly. We are fortunate to have within our team a study skills/education specialist, who has taken over the teaching and organisation of these modules. Under her guidance the students have produced detailed portfolios, demonstrating the development of their study skills over their first academic year. The potential nightmare of organising, supervising and documenting evidence of work-based learning has also caused much less stress for the team and the students than we had initially anticipated, due to the assistance of a member of our university validation panel, who supplied us with a copy of the work-based learning handbook for his course. We have now produced our own handbook, which the students have used across the year.

We now move into Year 2, where the modules total just 120 credits. The majority of time is spent studying Contract Law and Constitutional & Administrative Law, with the remaining 40 credits devoted to business modules. Although this second year is lighter in terms of module credits, the subject matter, in terms of law in particular, is much more in depth than that covered in the first year, and it will be interesting to see how the students adjust to and cope with this change. Watch this space!

Last Modified: 4 June 2010