Making good lawyers: challenges to vocational legal education

Andy Boon, University of Westminster

Opening address at the UKCLE Vocational Teachers Forum, 26 September 2001

In his opening address at the Vocational Teachers Forum 2001 Andy addressed the challenges currently facing vocational legal education, generated both externally, by the fragmentation of the legal profession, and internally, by the nature of vocational legal education. His paper concluded that while vocational legal education has made significant progress, it needs to continue to be adaptable, flexible and progressive in order to stay ahead of the demands being placed upon it.

I only started understanding [Law] when I started revising for exams…I wouldn’t say I had a natural aptitude for it. It’s a thing I learned. And so I didn’t enjoy it very much. I was one of these people who sat around saying, “Oh God, I wish I’d done English”.

— (Harriet)

Let me introduce you to Harriet. Not a typical lawyer, surely? Or is she? I met Harriet quite recently. She was interviewed as part of the cohort study Entry into the legal professions conducted for the Law Society. She was one of 15 newly qualified solicitors who, having made an uninterrupted progress from degree into practice, were among the first graduates of the new Legal Practice Course (LPC).

Most of them talked openly about their educational experiences, including traineeship, and I use some of what they say to illustrate the points I make in this paper. I mention her because this is material from which lawyers are made. I think the example of Harriet (and she is not alone in her indifference to legal study, even in my small study) raises an important question.

Do we do enough to make ‘good lawyers’? Do we have a clear idea what a good lawyer is? While those interested in the more abstract discussion of professional ethics know the good lawyer well, I wonder whether she is recognisable in the lexicon of the vocational education community? If you all drew a picture of the good lawyer, would the image be the same?

I want to keep the idea of the good lawyer as the subtext of this paper, and I will return to this idea in discussing how I think some of the challenges posed to vocational education can be addressed.

In this paper I am developing some of the ideas set out in earlier work, particularly a piece in Webb and Maughan’s book on Teaching lawyers’ skills and an article ‘History is past politics’ which appeared in the Journal of Law and Society. Both pieces are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, critical of vocational education as it has developed. But I want to make it clear that my criticisms are a counsel of perfection. I was an advocate of the changes we now see as normality and I was a consultant to the Inns of Court School of Law (ICSL) when they adopted their skills focus in the late 1980s. Since then, vocational legal education has taken huge steps forward and continues to make incremental advances as experience is gained of the new training regimes of the Bar and Law Society.

A good example of that process is the work of the Elias Working Party for the Bar. This picked up problems identified by providers themselves, and by the Bar’s monitoring process, and addressed them. (For example, the problem that some students in advocacy exercises read a script was addressed by requiring judicial intervention. Similarly, Elias required the introduction of competence in Ethics to be determined by marks gained from the aggregate of marks for recognising and dealing with ethical questions identified in the context of other assessment exercises.)

Sometimes though the development process is less positive, such as when the Law Society increased the amount of Business Law and Practice on the LPC in response to the demands of large firms. But, in the main, progress has been made in vocational education.

Today, I want to pose questions about what remains to be done. I argue that there is still room for deep thinking about the purposes and methods of vocational legal education, and in turn, about the content and assessment of the vocational stage, and the balance between the various learning activities engaged in there. I have integrated the themes of this forum, but my first task is to try to sketch what I think are some of the challenges for vocational education.

The challenges for vocational education

Context of professionalism

The last 30 years have seen some serious external challenges to the legal profession; loss of monopoly, deregulation and loss of autonomy. But one of the most serious problems confronting the profession is internal. It is the increasing differences between those delivering legal services in what they do, and the rewards they reap for doing it.

Thus we have legal sectors (the corporate and public sectors) in which the number of employed lawyers are growing rapidly. Within the still dominant private sector differences in the kinds of firm and the kinds of work they do have magnified. There is a rapidly developing gap between the experiences and rewards available to practitioners at different ends of the private practice spectrum. A quarter of solicitors in so-called high street firms struggle to make £25,000 per annum. An increasing number of partners in leading City firms earn over a million pounds per annum.

This is the problem identified in the literature on the legal profession as fragmentation. It presents the professions with many problems. One of the problems, of course, is that the public may think that it is getting poor service from very rich lawyers when, in truth, it is getting relatively good service from underpaid and overworked lawyers.

But fragmentation presents challenges to the legal profession which go beyond the familiar problems of image. For example:

• the wide divergence of interests makes common representation, ie a single professional body, problematic
• the diffusion of representation functions into interest groups (and here I mean the pressure to create new professional bodies) would render the profession’s claims to represent the public interest hollow
• the surrender of a claim to represent the public interest would lead to a decline into pure commercialism and thereby risk professional status and privileges

Education is often presented as a means of resolving tensions in the professional project. But education is also being affected by these developments. What other considerations are there? Vocational education is particularly sensitive to these pressures. This may be manifest in a number of ways, for example:

• the demand for more specialisation
• the demand for more training in situ, ie at the prospective workplace
• the loss of certainty about role and function

To some extent these challenges are already upon us with the so-called City LPC, which is a manifestation of the demand for specialisation. This is a step that may easily lead to the second: training in situ.

Of course, these refinements of professional education may be welcomed by those involved in vocational educational, either in principle or for commercial reasons. But, if there is to be a pressure for increasing specialisation, what role is there for a generalist vocational education? In the contemporary jargon, what value does it add to the process of preparing lawyers? Does it have advantages, for example, over a souped-up apprenticeship, or an in-house educational programme? And, just as important, does it have deficiencies compared to these?

The Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Education and Conduct (ACLEC) argued that “the need to maintain and develop a core of common professional values and skills in an increasingly diverse legal profession…implies that there should be the highest amount of common education which is practicable” and “the rigid divisions between academic and vocational education would need to disappear” (ACLEC Report para 2.2. at p23).

I agree with ACLEC that much might be lost by making vocational education a series of discrete, specialist offerings. The main prize lies in keeping alive the idea of a common professional culture and a unified profession, a goal that I have argued elsewhere is important in achieving political objectives.

But the education on offer has to justify itself, in these or some other terms. It has to be doing more to support this goal than just putting students bound for vastly different careers in the same classroom for their vocational course. I return to these issues later. Next I need to incorporate in my list of challenges those posed explicitly to professional education.

Context of professional education

The dominant paradigm of vocational legal education, based on skills and knowledge assessment, at only around ten years old still seems quite robust. However, it is not an uncontested domain. This is very obvious at the practical level, and not just in the dissatisfaction of the City firms.

But what is the theory that informs legal vocational education? In a recent article in the International Journal of the Legal Profession, Phil Jones suggests that the available approaches to professional legal education lie on a spectrum. At one end are those intended to teach and assess competence in task performance and those intended to encourage a sense of artistry in professional work by educating the reflective practitioner.

The risk in the first, he says, is of operationalism, an overly atomistic approach that uses checklists to tick off behaviours which, taken together, suggest competence at a task. The Law Society is currently embarked upon an ambitious consultation in which it proposes to continue with the competence model. (A consultation paper issued by the Training Framework Review Group in July 2001 aims to identify the competencies (knowledge, skills and ethics) appropriate to every stage of the solicitor’s career. The curriculum implications of this will be debated once the framework is established.)

The second approach, deriving from the work of the influential educationist Donald Schon, is seen as flawed on practical grounds and because it is romantic.

Phil, who designed the LPC on principles (developed by British Columbia) already implicit in the Bar Vocational Course (BVC) then run by the Inns of Court School of Law, identifies himself at, or at least seems to defend, the competence end of the spectrum. He cites work by Julian Webb and myself as examples of attempts to incorporate reflective practice into courses through, for example, the emphasis placed on the students’ own perception of their learning styles or their orientation to learning. Also, the role of the tutor as coach, whose job it is to provide reflection on thoughts and feelings at the moment of interaction and the use of a diary or learning log, in which the student records their thoughts and feelings, as they work through a simulated problem.

I am not sure that Phil’s spectrum represents the full range of possibilities, but let’s assume for the moment that it does. I put my hands up to much of Phil’s characterisation of my argument. Nor do I dissent from what I think is Phil’s argument (it is difficult to say, because while he seems to say that the ideal lies somewhere in the middle of the possibilities he suggests, he doesn’t really seem very happy with any point of the spectrum). But really, this is all a bit of a storm in a teacup, with both my position and Julian’s, to some extent, being constructed from straw.

Neither Julian nor I think that a vocational year based on Schon’s model of a practicum is sufficient or even financially viable. Both Julian and I start from the position that the re-designed BVC and LPC, with the emphasis on skills, was a massive improvement on what went before.

What concerned us at the time of writing the papers Phil cites (and still, given the continuing commitment to competencies in the Law Society consultation) is the risk that the checklist mentality becomes the dominant ethos of our professional schools. We argued that for education to deserve the label it must embrace wider values; inquiry, empowerment, commitment. What concerns us still is that the higher aspirations of the skills movement in pre-BVC and LPC would become compromised.

Early indications, for example Hugh Brayne’s article in The Law Teacher on the first year of the LPC, suggested they were. Student and staff anxiety about skills assessment were forcing both into over-prescribing the performance.

Now that the vocational courses are established, concerns about skills assessment have somewhat abated. But it remains doubly important that, in their middle age, the courses do not settle down into comfy complacency.

If we are not careful, they will. And in so many years time someone will come along and say “it ain’t working, we need another paradigm shift”. This might be avoided if we continue to focus on the kinds of student we want to produce and to keep in mind why we can produce those students better than anyone else.

We don’t want to model the mindless performance of tasks. We don’t want to jettison aspirations of artistry in favour of certainty, either in delivery or assessment. We want professionals who are competent technicians at what they do but who have a wider conception of their roles and capacities. And we want to affirm the individual qualities that are valued by employers; creativity, autonomy, motivation, are also valued by the profession.

Thus, I think, we need to question whether the original intended forms of the LPC in particular, the focus on transactions, has been squeezed out by too much time and energy being devoted to preparing for and administering low level, behaviouristic, skills assessments.

I return to these issues shortly. For the moment I want to ask, where do our conference themes fit with these challenges?

Forum themes

Teaching and corporate firms

Why do the corporate firms need the City LPC? I doubt that it is just a question of content. There is a lot of talk about general skills and knowledge, research skills and contract, and specialised knowledge like mergers and Acquisitions. But the nearest most City lawyers will get to handling a merger and acquisition in the first few years of practice is getting married and buying a house.

The City firms are concerned about the hard, non-communication skills. Perhaps we all should be. But if students had these skills, would they all get jobs in City firms? No, the prime criterion for entry to a City firm is a face that fits. Finding such faces is relatively easy; you recruit from Oxbridge if you can and move down the list of elite institutions if you can’t. Thus, Oxbridge History students tell how big firms courted them before they even started their CPE; so, they served work placements before they had even met Mrs Donoghue or Mr Stevenson. And, most of the time, it doesn’t matter how much law or practice they know. As Keith, a commercial lawyer, says:

The amount that I remember from law school, from both CPE and the LPC, you could put on the back of a postage stamp…[but] I wouldn’t change it because I don’t think its purpose is to provide anything but a grounding…you can only do it on a day to day basis, actually working it, meeting people, seeing how it works.

While Keith’s work is highly specialised it is not particularly demanding:

…all your precedents are there and everything’s there. You do have to do a reasonable amount of clean drafting around the precedent but your structure, your basics are there.

So, since he joined his firm, one of the big six, he says:

I think I probably spent a day at the most in the library in five and a half years.

George, also, while perceiving that his degree didn’t prepare him to become a solicitor, did not think that was a bad thing:

I think that it was more important to have a broad education than to have something that’s too narrow.

This takes us straight back to Harriet; the Law student who also does not want “something that’s too narrow”, who, in fact, can be heard to say “Oh God, I wish I’d done English”. She is not alone. Derek, for example says:

I don’t think I ever did have an academic interest in the law. You know, I went to university to read law to become a solicitor, and nothing more than that.

So we have a picture of students who don’t have a particular interest in law, do not learn (or at least remember much) about it and are not committed to legal values. And these are students who chose to study law. What about the CPE students, the Languages or Politics students, like Amy (not a corporate lawyer but a criminal lawyer in a legal aid firm), who realised that she might have difficulty finding a job? She says:

Luckily enough, I knew two people, one a solicitor who does a lot of high profile miscarriage cases, and someone who did documentaries…but the reason why I opted for law in the end was I thought that it was too competitive, getting into the media. It was no more honourable kind of motivation, I thought, ‘God, that looks a bit too difficult’.

All of this raises other difficult questions. Should we be concerned about the decline into commercialism? Shouldn’t students want to study Law because of a belief in, and desire for justice? Should they believe in the transformative potential of law in the social and political spheres? If they don’t, should we do something about it?

Perhaps we should, but studies of the apparent lack of values in many law students have concluded that the only way to change the output of law schools is to change the input. This brings us to non-traditional law students.

Non-traditional students

The professions have long been concerned that they are not sufficiently representative of society. Rightly so, if they wish to remain institutions enjoying a high degree of legitimacy.

I wonder whether it is appropriate any more to talk of a non-traditional student. Students who come into higher education without A levels have been around long enough to have a tradition of their own.

What is this tradition? It’s the reverse of the other group I just mentioned. If they are at the Bar they will be very small in number anyway. But the numbers that find a tenancy will be remarkably small. If they are intending to be solicitors, if they are lucky, they will get a place on a non-City LPC and a place in a non-City firm, where they will be joined by the large numbers from redbrick and modern universities not employed in City firms. Or they may be employed in the public sector, CPS or advice agency.

If they are less lucky they may get a job in a private practice firm in a quasi-professional capacity; paralegal, librarian, support worker. If they work for a high street firm they need, unlike their City counterpart, a wide diversity of skills; they may work for firms that do not know what it means to turn away work. They might have to turn their hands to anything. And, often unlike their City counterpart, they usually have to do it from day one. Not day one post-qualification, but day one traineeship.

Their fate, typically, is less to do with the way they have coped with not having traditional skills, because to get a place at the vocational stage one has to have these. If they wanted to work in a large corporate firm, their failure to do so is do with indirect discrimination based on the educational institution they attended.

If you want to be generous about the employment practices of these firms you could say they are lazy, but it is more insidious than that. I have numerous examples but one sticks in my mind as unusually blatant. Some of you may know Graham Robson, who is very active in organising student competitions. A couple of years ago he showed me a letter from a firm withdrawing sponsorship of one of these competitions. They said that the competition did not attract entries from universities from which they want to recruit students. This seems to me to be a very bad omen for the future of the profession.

Before I try and pull this together, let me say something about the third conference theme.

Skills delivery and innovations (trials, simulations and the use of communication and information technology

This is another entry point for the debate about competence and artistry. I recently read an article on course cultures and learning organisations in Active Learning in Higher Education (Gentle, 2001). This cited a view that I repeat with approval:

Operational competence…remains essentially a strategy for reproduction rather than for transformation.

What is in fact required nowadays, in most walks of life, is adaptability in individuals. If we think about the kind of curriculum most likely to produce that, we might anticipate moving away from formulaic and routinised delivery patterns, particularly of skills, towards more episodic, diverse and intensely supported learning activity. We might anticipate that it involves multimedia, some workplace learning, more emphasis on higher order intellectual skills, (analysis, synthesis, evaluation) and more on capacities; creativity, imagination, problem solving.

What we have done with our skills curriculum is to ask how people do a job and to break that down into component parts. We have prepared students to replicate a profession rather than to surpass it. Thinking more holistically is not without problems, but it does offer some advantages, including for the way vocational education packages and sells itself.

Why might we think that the glossy, interactive, transactional, skill-based vocational courses do not fit the bill? Students approve. Some students like them a lot. Derek, for example, achieved a commendation in his LPC. He observes that:

The tuition and lecturing given was, you know, of a much higher standard than I got at university…we were spoon-fed much more.

If this is a sign of old problems coming back to haunt us, what do students feel about the new bits of the vocational curriculum, the skills? Many students appreciate the more practical orientation of vocational education, particularly when they feel, as they often do, that they have been badly prepared for their chosen career by their degree.

But everything in the garden is not rosy. Harriet, for example, perceptively observed that:

[We] were all being trained to have uniform skills and what we didn’t need were uniform skills; we needed fairly specific skills depending on where we were going.

If some of these criticisms resonate, if they might represent serious challenges to vocational education, how might we begin to address these challenges?

Some possible approaches

In this section I do not set out to provide complete solutions to the problems facing vocational legal education. Rather, I attempt to identify some approaches to addressing these questions and, more pertinently, seek to identify the questions that need to be asked.

Picture the good lawyer

What is a good lawyer? Competence models tend to focus on low level, observable qualities rather than aspirational qualities. (For example, the most aspirational competency identified in the Law Society consultation paper is ‘integrity’.) Yet a lot of the work done on the idea of a good lawyer looks not at the technique of lawyers but at the the wider role that lawyers play.

Anthony Kronman in The lost lawyer bemoans, to simplify, the loss of the ideal of the lawyer statesman. Mary Ann Glendon in A nation under lawyers suggests the decline of the operation of lawyers as a moderating force in social change and, thus, as agents in the preservation of democracy. These critiques cast lawyers as servants of special interests or as technicians who have lost the capacity for practical wisdom. (On this see further the chapter by Morawetz in Economides’ Ethical challenges to legal education and conduct.) They all suggest a lack. But is it a lack that might be remedied by education?

How safe is it to design a course to produce good lawyers? We might argue that it is safer to model courses based on existing, rather than prototype lawyers. But how safe is that? Are we sure that the results we get justify our methods?

Research conducted by the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, reported by Richard Moorhead at the Socio-Legal Studies Association annual conference in 2001, found that lawyers were less likely to give accurate advice than their counterparts in advice agencies. This, Richard said, was also true where the problem was not in a known area but called for diagnostic skills involving knowledge of broad areas of law. So, how far can we be confident that the current emphasis in the curriculum actually works?

I am not going to draw you a picture of the good lawyer. I think that is largely a matter for the vocational legal community to negotiate (and possibly only this community university degrees tend not to accept this responsibility). When you have your picture of the good lawyer we need to ask “to what extent does the curriculum, the delivery methods (including the role this requires of staff) and the activity required of students, help students to become that good lawyer?”

Focus the curriculum on the whole student

The idea that education needs to be more explicit about values is not limited to the professions. For example, we are now getting citizenship education in schools. But it is not a new idea that lawyers’ legal education should seek both to inculcate values and to underline the transformative responsibilities of legal professionals. The ACLEC Report quoted with approval the Ormrod Report, which, in addition to substantive knowledge, observed that lawyers:

…must also acquire the professional skills and techniques which are essential to practice, and a grasp of the ethos of the profession; he must also cultivate a critical approach to existing law, an appreciation of its social consequences, and an interest in, and positive attitude to, appropriate development and change.

— (Report of the Committee on Legal Education 1971, Cmnd 4595)

In its consultation paper on the initial stage of legal education ACLEC also described a vision of what legal education and training should aim to achieve:

• intellectual integrity and independence of mind…a high degree of self-motivation, and ability to think critically for oneself beyond conventional attitudes and understanding and to undertake self-directed learning; to be reflective, in the sense of being self aware and self-critical; to be committed to truthfulness, to be open to other viewpoints, to be able to formulate and evaluate alternative possibilities, and to give comprehensible reasons for what one is doing or saying
• core knowledge – a proper knowledge of the general principles, nature and development of law and of the analytical and conceptual skills required by lawyers
• contextual knowledge – an appreciation of the law’s social, economic, political, philosophical, moral and cultural contexts
• legal values – a commitment to the rule of law, to justice, fairness and high ethical standards, to representing clients without fear or favour, to promoting equality of opportunity, and to ensuring that adequate legal services are provided to those who cannot afford to pay for them
• professional skills – learning to act like a lawyer…[involving] a combination of knowing how to conduct oneself in various practice settings, and also carrying out those forms of practice

Is it not strange that the consultation paper suggested that the first two of these were the province only of the first degree? The fourth, legal values, it said was acquired through the whole education process including socialisation in the professions. Only the fifth component, professional skills, was seen to be the sole province of vocational courses and in-service training. It is not clear, however, where students get their legal values from, since, as vocational teachers know, a pervasive topic can easily be lost. The vocational stage is perhaps the obvious place to take responsibility for values.

Whether or not one agrees with the ACLEC Report, its first chapter remains a very good summary of the issues confronting legal education and possibilities for its future, is immaterial. ACLEC may have been uninspired about the role of vocational education. Its list may only represent a starting point for developing the good lawyer. What values, if any, do the vocational legal education community think vocational education should develop?

Be serious about the objectives of active learning

As someone previously involved in clinical legal education I am fascinated by the emergence of pro bono publico. What difference is there, if any, between clinic and student pro bono? In practical terms any observable difference is relatively minor. There can be very few examples of live clinic services which do not meet standard criteria for pro bono services if only because, one imagines, clients who must use students for lawyers probably do not have money. (See my article in New Law Journal for more on this issue.)

What is different, however, is the rhetoric surrounding clinic or pro bono legal services. Clinic has fitted well into the ubiquitous rationale of Anglo-American legal education; to help students think like a lawyer. Michael Zander, one of the first English academics to comment favourably on the rise of clinic in the USA, noted that it provided “clearer insights into the nature of law and its functions”.

More recently, Brayne, Duncan and Grimes, in their book on clinical legal education, suggested that clinical legal education is an effective means of learning concepts, rules and ethics, a focus for developing independent learning and achieving “…learning goals implicit in educating lawyers”.

Brayne, Duncan and Grimes set out a list of learning outcomes for law; understanding context, reflecting critically on legal doctrine and the operation of law, understanding and applying ethical principles, solving problems through factual and legal analysis, understanding and beginning to apply professional skills, directing his or her own learning. In their view the goal of service provision only has a place in either degree or vocational level study if it also serves the educational aims set for the clinic. Thus, in conflicts between student’s educational needs and client needs, the former must triumph.

Increasing the understanding of, and ability to apply, law is a very important goal of clinic, but it should not be the primary goal of prono bono publico. In a postscript to the book Adrian Evans observes that the English experiment in clinic, as described by Brayne, Duncan and Grimes, shares one of the features of clinic in Australia. It leans towards the exploitation by students of their clients in the interests of the future income-earning potential of the students.

The thrust of the criticism is that the English approach uses clients for the educational process rather than to value client empowerment as an equal goal of the venture. It ignores the fact that clients who acquire legal power from interactions with students legitimise the learning process for those students.

This, apparently, is not pure rhetoric on the part of Evans. Students at Monash University in Victoria working at the Springvale Legal Service undertake group work intended to help clients with an issue in common to establish an action group, research the problem and take action. This harnesses the empowering potential of community action by students.

Duncan and Grimes undertake to reflect on Evans’ critique in their book. However, in response to a recent criticism of clinic in legal education in a popular magazine, Richard Grimes reiterates the earlier technical justifications for clinic.

We now hear that pro bono publico is, as the result of a collaboration between the Clinical Legal Education Organisation (CLEO) and the Solicitors Pro Bono Group, bringing the values of public service into vocational legal education. Or is it?

There has been an increase in law school activity. Sarah Browne recently reported that 30 of the 81 heads of university law schools said pro bono work existed in their school, and 13 said it was planned. Of the 28% of respondents who would consider offering students pro bono work, the most frequently offered reason for not doing so was lack of funding. The numbers of students involved in those programmes are, I suspect, relatively small.

But, what is the evidence that a public service orientation emerges from involvement in pro bono publico? A number of projects have suggested that lawyers are no more public spirited than business students on arriving at law school, that they become more conservative in their career aspirations as they progress through law school and that the nature of the curriculum probably has less impact on public interest orientations than the reality of the employment market they face. (See the articles by Schleeff, Sherr and Erlanger respectively.)

The evidence that law school experience is formative in terms of predispositions to pro bono work is weak at best. As I have mentioned, one of the most ambitious studies of law student motivation concluded that, while the attitudes of law academics may be partly responsible for any decline in law student orientation to public service, only changing the typical intake of law schools would make any significant difference to the public service orientations of lawyers.

Yet, our recent research for the Law Society (reported recently in the Modern Law Review) found that, despite the massive differences in income between entrants to high street and City firms, there was a large degree of general satisfaction with career choice across the board and surprisingly little envy of salary differentials in those from high street firms. Some students go to law for the money apparently, and more and more maybe do so nowadays. Some go for the intrinsic rewards of the work.

What does it tell us that, as far as one can tell, the most vibrant pro bono cultures are often found in large firms? What obligation does legal education have to reconcile the experiences of prospective lawyers, and might the best vehicle, assuming common education, again be the kind of pro bono described by Adrian Evans, the kind of pro bono where the interests of clients, and justice, are the paramount considerations?

I am very interested in the link between pre qualification clinic or pro bono work and post qualification commitment to such work or to the values of public service. I am very aware that pro bono is offered as the response to any criticism of legal professionalism (see Rhode 2000). But, at the moment, it appears to be the best vehicle for some of the values I am advocating for the good lawyer, and also one of the best ways of restoring the transactional element in vocational courses and according communication skills their proper place.

Model the community we want the profession to be

What kind of community produces the kinds of lawyers we want to produce? We are all committed to a rhetoric of lifelong and self directed learning. What does this imply? I suggest that, if it is meaningful in the professional context, it implies the staged withdrawal of teachers from the activity of learners so that they, the learners, are settings goals, researching to support objectives and supporting each other.

Again, is clinic/pro bono at least part of the answer here? But shifting the curriculum around to accommodate genuine self directed learning implies, of course, a renewed attempt to slay what William Twining calls the dragon of coverage. But he is a slippery beast (the dragon, not William) and, as I have argued, I think it is a moot point what bits of the vocational year could make way for the more active attention to transactions and application that I am advocating.

There are two main problems; the professions, who want their material covered, and most teachers, who prefer their work to be familiar and predictable. But, somewhere, an accommodation has to be found between static content and the dynamic potential of the curriculum. You are the best ones to debate that balance. Phil Jones argues that while vocational courses are, understandably, dominated by practice, professionals, (and, we should add, the teachers of professionals), depend on theory to legitimise their work.

What is interesting about the current regime of vocational legal education is that very little of the theory that underpins it, educational or otherwise, derives from the vocational legal sector. It continues to be generated by academics who have little experience of practice, or even of vocational course delivery.

The material produced by vocational stage teachers tends (not universally but tends) to be written for LPC or BVC students doing the course. It would be nice to think that vocational teachers are not only experimenting with teaching methodology but communicating their findings in the wider community.

Thus, finally, the vocational education community is that; an educational community. It is important, if this community is going to continue to be healthy and thrive, that there is a climate of intellectual inquiry and communication. These are also values we want to inculcate in our students.

Construct a stronger, more unified political profile

It is not clear to me what kind of voice the providers of vocational education have or how much it is listened to. An impression is that it tends not to be one voice. In certain areas, of institutional competition for example, this is perhaps inevitable.

It is a shame though that there is not a more powerful exposition of the merits and values of legal vocational education, at least to contest the centre ground with academic legal education. Vocational education has novel strengths that deserve to be understood and championed. You are the ones to do it.

Conclusion

My main message is that it remains important to be open to new ways of doing things, ways that might be more effective in turning out good lawyers. And we need to reflect on the effectiveness of what we do, to consider the outcomes for students, to experiment with ways to make it better, to debate and to theorise, and to report the results to our wider community.

I suggest that, while vocational education has made significant progress, it needs to continue to be adaptable, flexible and progressive in order to stay ahead of the demands being placed upon it. I hope I have indicated some potentially profitable directions.

References

• Boon A (1996) ‘Skills in the initial stage of legal education: theory and practice for transformation’ in J Webb J and C Maughan Teaching lawyers’ skills London: Butterworths
• Boon A (1998) ‘History is past politics: a critique of the legal skills movement in England and Wales’ Journal of Law and Society 25 (1) 151-169
• Boon A and Levin J (2000) The ethics and conduct of lawyers in England and Wales Oxford: Hart
• Boon A and Whyte A (2000) ‘Pro bono publico: it’s a matter of principle’ New Law Journal 27 October 564
• Boon A, Duff L and Shiner, M (2001) ‘Career paths and choices in a highly differentiated profession: the position of newly qualified solicitors’ Modern Law Review 64 (4) 563-594
• Brayne H, Duncan N and Grimes R (1998) Clinical legal education: active learning in your law school London: Blackstone Press
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Last Modified: 4 June 2010