We're back!

Moira and I got back from Kenya on Sunday after an incredible challenge. This was the first visit to Africa for both of us, and the first time we had ever attempted a long distance cycle ride. It was tough. Believe me, we have earned every penny of your sponsorship money! On the last day of the ride we visited the project at Mumia that the International Childcare Trust is sponsoring with a local action group. The aim of the project is to build a drop-in centre and night shelter for street children . The centre will also provide adult education and other facilities to work with local women, including widows who are being supported to take on fostering projects with AIDS orphans and others, and families in crisis. The greeting we received (pictured) was extraordinary and it was an intensely moving experience. The first floor of the centre is virtually complete, funded by some of the money raised out of last year's Cycle Cambodia challenge, and the building was opened by ICT's chairman during our visit. The Cycle Kenya team were a great group of individuals, and even though it was tough, we had a real ball. The memories from this trip - and the visit to the Mumia project in particular - will stay with us for a very long time indeed.

A big THANK YOU again to everyone who has supported us so far. Our Just Giving site is still operational, so please, if you haven't sponsored us already and would like to, there is still time to do so. We are also in the process of putting a day-by-day account of the challenge up on Moira's blog, linked here

Ere we go...!

Its reached the fateful day. We leave Warwick this afternoon for an overnight flight to Nairobi and 411kms of cycling. Feeling more than a little apprehensive about a couple of the days - days two and four - which involve over 100 kms, which looks to be mostly upwards, and then 88kms with a big 25 km ascent in the afternoon. We've done some good mileage in training, but not enough hills I fear.....

But there's no turning back - that's why they call it a challenge! Thanks again to all out fantastic supporters who have helped us raise nearly £5000 already, and our major fund-raising events still have to take place. The photo here relates to one of those - a children's charity cycle ride in Victoria Park, Leamington which is happening on the Sunday after we get back - 25th November from 10.30 am. Big thanks to Roger and hirecentres.com for sponsoring this event on our behalf and to Stephen, our Police community support officer (pictured here with some of our first participants) who has been a tremendous help with all the detailed arrangements. Come and support us if you're in the area!

Until our return.......

The numbers' game

I got copied in yesterday to an interesting puzzle that Shakeel - our Information Manager at UKCLE - had uncovered for Gary Slapper at the Open University. Recent UCAS statistics apparently indicate that just under 90% of those applying for law are getting in. So what, Gary asked, has happened, and what about that still widely held belief that law is a massively oversubscribed subject?

I don't actually know the answer, but I have no particular reason to doubt the data. The following I think is a reasonable supposition based on what I do know about the admissions system over the last 10-15 years (the older stats quoted below pretty much all come from UCAS, courtesy of the study on "Access to and Participation in Undergraduate Legal Education" (Faculty of Law Working Paper No. 2, UWE Bristol, 1996) that Vera Bermingham and I undertook for the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee in 1995.

1) The extent to which law was oversubscribed was probably always a bit mythical, reflecting the way students applied to the old UCCA/PCAS system pre-1993-4. Under that system students could apply through UCCA to six universities (I think) and then separately to about the same number of polytechnics (now post-92 universities) via PCAS. There were a lot of insurance applications across the two schemes as students tried to protect their position - especially in case they did worse than they expected. This would have inflated the admissions figures. In the last year of the old scheme UCCA and PCAS together handled 31,760 applications. In the first year of the combined UCAS scheme (for 1994 entry) UCAS handled 20,988 - that doesn't mean almost 11,000 less students applied to read law, it just means that the number of applications became a truer reflection of the real number of applicants across the system as a whole.

2) Since then we know that institutions have recruited significantly more students to LLB coursess, and that the number and range of courses has also expanded. In 1994 about 8,000 students were admitted to qualifying law degrees. It appears that, subsequently, that number has more than doubled.

3) In 1994 the overall ratio of UCAS applicants to admitted students was about 2.5:1 - itself way below the old UCAS/PCAS average which I believe was nearer to 12 or even 15:1. Interestingly, the number of applicants in 1994 and in the latest figures are strikingly similar. I suspect the figure may be relatively constant in the intervening period. If that is correct, then, logically, if the number of applicants remains constant, and the number of places continues to grow, we would reach the position we seem to have now: near parity between applicants and places.

That of course represents an interesting challenge, particularly as yet more law degrees are due to come on stream in the next year or so, eg, at York and Winchester, and British universities seem to be doing less well in the highly competitive market for international students. While the elite law schools may be protected by their status and popularity from the worst effects of these trends, and will, I am sure, continue to be oversubscribed, the lives of admissions tutors in some law schools may be about to become even more interesting. How long can you keep fishing at a nearly empty pool?

"Transforming legal education"

This modest little title belongs to an excellent book just published (Ashgate, 2007) by Prof Paul Maharg of Glasgow Graduate School of Law. Paul is one of the most innovative thinkers around on legal education and his work at Strathclyde on creating transactional learning environments (teaching through simulated legal transactions) is really world class. This book reflects on a lot of that experience, but does much more in terms of developing an alternative theory of legal education pedagogy - which incidently involves linking the construction of the legal realist curriculum at Columbia in the 1920s, ethics education at Edinburgh University in the eighteenth century; and the practices of the mediaeval "Glossators" of Roman Law!

Perhaps even more interesting is the experiment that goes with the book. Paul and a number of colleagues have just launched a wiki which will form the basis of a community of practice for what Paul calls the "Transforming Initiative". I've just signed up to it, though blowed if I know quite what I'm going to do with it - yet! If you're interested in the project, go to Paul's Transforming Legal Education website - linked here

Disabling education?

Earlier today I was reading through a paper by Jenkins, Healey and Zetter on the HEA website entitled “Linking teaching and research in disciplines and departments” (published in April 2007). I was struck and somewhat depressed by the fact that none of the examples they cited were of developments in UK law schools. Of course I can’t say for sure why that was (I haven’t asked them for one thing), but when I also tried to track down examples of research-based teaching on the UKCLE website, I found remarkably little there either. Of course, the good news might be that everyone in law schools has sussed out the teaching-research nexus, and its so second nature now that nobody bothers to talk about it. But somehow I don’t think so.

Before going any further with this potential rant, I ought to clarify an earlier distinction that Alan Jenkins and Mick Healey made between research-led and research-based teaching, because I think it is fairly crucial. Research-led teaching, putting it crudely, reflects the student-as-audience paradigm of teaching, where they sit back and admire our erudition as we introduce them to our latest piece of cutting-edge research. Research-based teaching, on the other hand is a form of inquiry-based learning which treats the student as a (joint) participant in the research (and hence the learning) process. My betting is that, beyond the still fairly ubiquitous and highly variable experience of writing a final year dissertation, most law undergraduates experience at least some research-led teaching but very little genuinely research-based learning.

If that’s so, then I suggest we are missing a real opportunity and perpetuating a form of what (adapting Ivan Illych’s notion of disabling professions) I am inclined to call disabling education – an education that actively disempowers our students. It manifests itself in the attitude that we can’t or shouldn’t expect too much originality or creativity of poor little undergraduates. A variation of the same attitude seems to emerge with monotonous regularity in discussions about clinical legal education, when non-participants express doubts/shock/total horror at the idea of undergraduates actually being allowed to give legal advice to real people.

For us as academics to keep students at arms length from the experience of research seems to involve

(a) an impressive example of discrepant reasoning – speaking personally it was precisely the experience of doing a research project and being encouraged to write as an undergraduate that led me to start thinking about academia as a career, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that, or
(b) pure humbug – do we really think that the skills we have developed as researchers are so advanced and so specialised that they are wholly beyond the ken of our students?

and, from the point of view of the future of the academic profession, it is surely about as smart a survival strategy as being in the front row of the charge of the Light Brigade.

I do know that there are some examples of research-based learning happening in our law schools, and I’d love to hear from other colleagues who are doing this sort of work. I know that the people leading these courses find them engaging, motivating and exciting for themselves and their students, and that developing the research-teaching nexus has direct benefits for their own research, as well as for their students’ learning. In a recent e-mail exchange, Ben Pontin, who has been doing some very interesting research-based work with his Environmental Law module at UWE Bristol, observed “Students are brilliant at gathering 'raw material' - trawling historical archives (newpapers, official records, family histories) for snippets of information; detective work. Also, there was a geography dimension to the research, and students enjoyed designing field trips to the sites of leading nuisance actions, to identify whether any trace of what claimants were seeking to protect remains today. However, where students needed input from an academic was in interpreting the significance of empirical findings. Great at treating law as a material object (a field or stately home protected against a polluting factory or sewage works), students struggled with law's ideas!” I think that last observation makes for a particularly interesting insight and suggests a useful point around which we could reconstruct the role of the teacher in a more research-based legal education process.

TGI Friday

Just back from a day in London at a one day conference organised by three enterprising PhD students at Queen Mary. The theme was "Legal academics: Spectators or Players?" and the organisers had got a really interesting group of people together to discuss the role of legal academics and their relationship with legal practice. It could all have been a bit of a non-event, but as it was it was one of those days where the synergies worked and it sparked all sorts of interesting research and policy questions, much of it around the role of legal education in this relationship. I hope it leads on to some real outputs; it would be a shame to waste all that energy!

Its just as well it was an energising day as the batteries here are running pretty low. Its been a busy summer at the end of a long year. I've been working hard on about three different writing projects, as well as trying to keep on top of my work for the Centre and the RAE, so its been pretty much six day weeks since May, with just a week off for hols in August. Not what most people think us academics do with our time, I suspect. Even so there have been good bits. the Warwick RAE is taking shape, I am getting through the writing - if slowly - and UKCLE has just had its annual Advisory Board, and got some great feedback and support from the Board, which is so valuable to the team. Now its all about gearing up for the new academic year which starts in a week's time; I'm teaching a first year undergraduate module this term, for the first time in a long time, and have also taken over the leadership of the LLM Legal Education, and there's still a fair amount to do on both those fronts. But tomorrow, no work!

Cycle Kenya

Just a short post to let anyone out there know that I'm still alive and this blog is still active!

A massive thank you from us and the kids we're supporting to the many generous people who have sponsored us so far on our Cycle Kenya charity ride. We have reached the £3000 target we needed to raise by 31 August to make the cut for this trip. In recognition of this tremendous achievement Moira has raised our total fundraising target from £8000 to £20,000. Its the kind of thing she does when she comes back all inspired from a course, bless. So, watch this space, or alternatively don't watch this space, but go to our Just Giving site and add some coppers to the collection :-)

Goodbye to Berlin

As I mentioned in my last blog, I've not long been back from a few days in Berlin, combining the Law & Society Association/Research Committee for Sociology of Law conference with a weekend away with the divine Ms B.

The conference itself was massive, held at the Humboldt University (pictured). Running over five days there were easily over 2000 delegates and (someone told me) nearly 40 parallel streams. I managed to attend about eight: a mixture of legal ethics, legal profession and social theory streams. One of the reasons I went was that there was a lot of systems theory happening, with a number of well-established names performing - Gunther Teubner, Michael King, Jean Clam, and my former colleague and continuing friend John Paterson to name but a few, and systems theory is relevant to my slowly progressing book project on Law, Complexity and Globalization. There was relatively little legal education, or at least not in a coordinated fashion. It was mostly odd papers scattered across streams, which made it more difficult to follow it as a theme. Unfortunately one legal education session that had been coordinated by my Brit colleagues Fiona Cownie and Tony Bradney clashed with my own paper ('Socio-Legal Studies, Transdisciplinarity and the Challenge of Complexity') which partly rehashed and partly developed ideas I'd previous published in Michael Freeman's Current Legal Issues volume on Law and Sociology (Oxford UP, 2006).

Still, legal education wasn't the primary purpose of my going this time, and it was an interesting event. One of the things that I found interesting was the very clear sense I got of the growing split between European and US approaches to socio-legal scholarship. This may not have been everyone's experience of the conference of course; I did attend a number of sessions that focussed on quite distinctively European theories or themes, at which US attendance - and certainly participation - was significantly less, and that may have skewed my view. But I was certainly struck by the degree to which in a couple of theory sessions the Europeans (including the Brits) were operating in a very different theoretical space from the US Americans. A lot of the US law and society project still seems very much caught up with a strongly positivist social science or liberal political philosophy.

And more skills

Apologies for leaving you on tenterhooks (not!) for the next exciting instalment, but the realities of various deadlines intervened before I rushed off around dawn last Wednesday to fly to Berlin for the Law & Society Association/Research Committee for Sociology of Law mega-bash aka conference.

I had planned to post a blog or two from Berlin, just to display my international credentials, but after watching a couple of the Americans feverishly blogging away (and hearing of another who had been barking instructions at some poor research assistant in the States who was clearly providing research back-up for his/her master's blog). I rather went off the idea. Anyway this was my first trip to Berlin, and what makes you think I'd stay in and blog when there's a whole city famed for its bars - erm, I mean culture - to be explored!

But now I'm back, and its back to thinking about a post-Leitch world of higher education.

What probably interests me most about Leitch and World Class Skills is the way in which it signals another step in the potential shift in focus and in the power-relations that shape the world of higher education. For the present government a general nod, or even a larger commitment, to knowledge transfer will no longer be enough:

“all HE institutions need to grow their capacity to engage on a large scale with employers, in ways adapted to their different profiles and missions. Those activities should share equal status with research and academic activities. ‘Business facing’ should be a description with which any higher education institution feels comfortable”
- World Class Skills, para 3.56


Whether this shift will in fact deliver the skills outcomes the economy needs may prove to be a moot point. World Class Skills potentially puts a lot of faith in the rationality of markets, and the ability of a demand-led approach to deliver. We are not operating in a planned economy; the fact that employers might want an extra 100,000 science and engineering graduates does not mean universities will provide them, not least because that demand may not have translated well to the traditional (18-20 year old) supply-side of the equation. World Class Skills recognises that, if this gap is to be closed, it will be increasingly by “upskilling” and retraining those already in the workplace. Fortuitously, in a sense, this coincides with demographic changes that will see a substantial decline in the 18-20 population by 2020 (though the actual effects of these changes are still debatable). Universities therefore are aware of the need to develop new markets. The delivery of higher level skills and more work-based learning is clearly one avenue, and one worth an estimated £5 billion at that. But for this change to be effective will require both high quality manpower forecasting and planning by industry, and a greater degree of market ‘savvy’ and responsiveness from the higher education sector.

In the move to a demand-led model, the government makes much of its intention to increase the “purchasing power” of employers. It also makes it abundantly clear that most of the growth in training will be funded by those same employers: they may be able to get more of what they want, but they will have to pay for it. This may not be a problem for the top end of the market (whether that be the major multi-national business or the global law firm), who are already using opportunities created by the liberalisation of the education market to build increasingly tailored academic and vocational provision. But the bespoke approach will not work for much of the market, whether in law or anything else. In this context the Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) are likely to drive much of the agenda. Essentially employer-led organisations, they act as brokers between employers and training providers, and have been empowered to create and control the National Occupational Standards which contain the knowledge and skills outcomes prescribed, at various levels of achievement, for a growing range of occupations. They have money and market information, can claim to speak on behalf of the world of work, and, while they cannot directly impinge on the autonomy of universities to develop and validate their own awards, they do have the power to ‘endorse’ higher education programmes which satisfy their professional and occupational standards.

However, despite some obvious advantages, the sectoral approach adopted by the SSC model overall could also prove to be a rather blunt instrument. Concerns, for example, have been expressed in some areas (not the “justice sector” so far as I am aware) that the SSCs may be open to capture by particular sub-sectors or certain key employers. This may well put to the test the assumption that what is in the (perceived) interests of employers will be in the interests of the economy as a whole. Furthermore, for both the SSCs and educational providers, matching needs and provision, particularly in respect of less obviously vocational courses and disciplines is also likely to be difficult. For example, Skills for Justice is the SSC for the “justice sector”, and yet much of its work, particularly in respect of the criminal justice system is not particularly served by the law schools. Similarly, for the law schools, the fact that a potentially significant number of their graduates will not work in the “justice sector” begs the question as to which other SSCs they should also be talking to. At the least it seems that there are genuine coordination and information gaps to be addressed.

This in fact is but one branch of a much bigger issue implicitly posed by World Class Skills: the extent to which the employment agenda represents a potentially fundamental structural challenge to traditional university disciplines and the construction of higher education as a distinct and distinctive branch of learning.

Skills, skills, skills!

On 18 July the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) published its response to the Leitch Review. In World Class Skills (Cm 7181), it undertakes to deliver an extensive programme of innovations designed to bring the UK into the ‘premier league’ of skilled workforces by 2020.

‘Skills’, not ‘education’, is thus, once again, the word of the moment. Doubtless conspiracy theorists will have seen it coming: the fact that education is now the responsibility of two government departments, neither of which carries ‘education’ in its title was surely an omen of something.

Of course, in a national context where around five million adults still lack functional literacy, a bit of skills focus may not be a bad thing at all. And I for one am quite happy to agree that reading, writing and ‘rithmatic need to be a continuing priority. But what about my patch, higher education? In the course of this and the next couple of blogs I'll try to offer a basic summary and some reflections on what World Class Skills might have in store for HE. Today I'll start with the basics.

World Class Skills I suggest should be read and taken seriously by anyone interested in or concerned by UK education policy. It represents the latest confluence of various streams of regional, national and international HE policy which together stress the importance of moving to a model which provides (in theory) a more integrated, more flexible, and demand- (for which read employer-) led approach to secondary, tertiary and higher education. The amount of activity in this area has already been significant. In case you've been sojourning on Mars or otherwise taking a break from all this policy stuff, some key examples are:

• the development of 14-19 diplomas, intended to bridge the gap between existing academic and vocational qualifications;
• the new national Qualifications and Credit Framework which intends, building on demand- and market-led principles, to further rationalise and standardise delivery of post-secondary and adult education (separate frameworks for Wales and Scotland are in place);
• the work of the Burgess Group on a common credit framework for HE, one aim of which is to facilitate progression from FE to HE;
• the proposal, now encapsulated in the Further Education Bill, that appropriate colleges will be given the power to award their own foundation degrees;
• recognition, following Leitch, that employer engagement is a strategic priority for HEFCE in 2006-11 (there is already a significant range of funding council activity in this area in respect of the ‘Higher Level Skills’ pathfinder projects, e-skills and workforce development projects, as well as the creation of an Action Group on employer engagement);
• agreement at the London Ministerial Summit in May 2007 that employability and employer engagement were among the ‘Bologna’ priorities for the European Higher Education Area in the lead-up to the next summit in 2009.

As widely anticipated the DIUS proposals adopt pretty much all of the key recommendations in Lord Leitch’s report. Among the important aspirations and objectives for higher education identified are:

• a target of 36% of adults educated to level four (foundation degree) and above by 2014
• HEFCE to develop a new funding model that is “co-financed with employers, achieves sustained growth in employer-based student places and introduces the principle of employer demand-led funding.”
• Five thousand additional university places announced for 2008-09 to be jointly-funded by HEFCE and industry, with a strong focus on collaborative, work-based programmes. Further growth of at least 5,000 additional entrants in each year up to 2010-11 is expected.
• A new Commission for Employment and Skills to be created and Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) to be re-licensed and given an enhanced role in co-ordinating demand-led vocational education. SSCs and higher education institutions to be encouraged to extend their collaborative work.
• A key role is also identified for DIUS itself, working with the Higher Education Regulation Review Group and the Gateways to Professions Collaborative Forum, in brokering partnerships between the professional bodies, SSCs and higher education institutions.

OK that's enough for now. I'm going to lie down in a darkened room and try and figure out what this might actually mean in policy and practice terms....

Pardon?

OK so its not got anything to do with legal education as such but I couldn't resist. The Lawyer (again) had a wonderful piece today on the fact that the Institute of Barristers' Clerks has prepared a glossary of clerking slang. As its not 1st April I am assuming it is the real thing! For those of you who thought most legal language was a bit obscure, trust me, this is in a league of its own.

If you wander across to my old friend John Flood's blawg you will find various snippets about this extraordinarily idiosyncratic part of the English legal system, as John pretty much cut his teeth as a researcher on the subject of barristers clerks rather longer ago than he might care to admit. I do know we've shared one or two "frighteners" over the years. but I wonder if he knows what a "Dionne Warwick" is? Watch this space.... My personal favourite is the definition of a "fox hole": "area beneath desk where telephone calls can take place peacefully". Now that really is what I call a bad day at the office.

On my bike (or not)...

The observant amongst you may have noticed (if you haven't already heard more directly) that I'm doing a charity cycle ride in Kenya in November. The last two weeks of almost incessant rain haven't done much for the training regime, so the re-appearance of the sun this weekend provided an opportunity to hit the road again, so we (self and intrepid partner) set off yesterday morning to one of our favourite training areas, Draycote Water, near Dunchurch. It's a reservoir with a five mile tarmac perimeter 'road' (mostly about the width of a single track), so its generally a good place to train without getting mown down by traffic. Generally.

Anyhow, yesterday was not that great; there was a strong head/side wind most of the way round and after 10 miles and forty minutes, though we could have done more, we'd actually had enough, so we gave it up on the basis we would do a longer ride today. Arriving at Draycote (again) at about 9.30 this morning, we found there were quite a lot of walkers and cyclists already milling around - a bit of a shock, its usually pretty quiet when we go, but I guess the good weather had a lot to do with it. But the conditions were better, so off we set, occasionally weaving through groups of walkers and families on bikes who happily milled across the full width of the path. About four and a half miles round, I found myself on one of the narrow access roads facing an approaching small car and elderly driver. I mentally paused for a bit, thinking am I going to get through or should I stop? But I figured there was room if the car pulled over a bit and I stuck fairly close to the kerb. Well I certainly got close to the kerb. The car did not pull over, the wrong instinct kicked in and, instead of breaking whilst unclipping my left foot from the pedal to come to a safe halt, I caught the kerbstone and flew off the bike onto the grass (fortunately) verge! As I picked myself up I looked back to see the driver pause long enough to see that I was on my feet before moving off again - nearly mowing down a couple of walkers in the process! Thanks, mate.

So, what's this got to do with education? Probably not a lot really, I just wanted to tell you what a crappy day I've had! But that's not really true either. Getting back on a bike after thirty odd years has been a slightly humbling LEARNING experience. Its kind of funny being a bit of a novice at something again (I think I've reached a stage in life where I usually avoid things I know I'm not going to be much good at!) True, you never quite forget how to ride a bike, but anything beyond the basics still requires quite a (re-)learning curve - in some ways almost more so because you still have the sense of what you could do then. So its actually a bit of a shock to discover what you can't do now (yet) - like getting your water bottle on the move without falling off or veering into the nearest hedge/car/other cyclist. Without getting too Rumsfeldian about it, there's definitely a process of discovering what you don't know you don't know about your own abilities - both positive and negative! And that's surely what a lot of learning has to be about. I think I'm going to be nicer to my first years come September; after all there's an awful lot they don't know they don't know - yet.

All tomorrow's parties - postscript

By coincidence, the Lawyer has just reported in its latest survey of the profession that 24% of lawyers would like a change of career. More than 50% of Associates in what the article described as "lower mid-market" firms (with a turnover between £25M and £50M) wanted to leave the profession. The survey indicates also the extent to which high salaries act as 'golden handcufffs' - the liklihood of a cut in pay is cited by 70% of those who want to leave legal practice as the major barrier to doing so.

Is this a reliable finding? Hard to say from where I'm sitting, but its not obviously hugely flawed. The survey was conducted by YouGov for the Lawyer. It obtained over 2,500 responses. This is certainly enough to form the basis of a good representative sample, though this article says nothing more about the demographics. The sample would have been self-selecting, so some skewing can't be ruled out, and we don't know if any tests of statistical significance were used to check the data. (In social science research these are useful because they indicate the reliability of data by computing the probability that a particular finding was not the product of chance).

Turned around, of course, this finding also suggests that around 75% of lawyers overall don't want to leave the law. Does that still sound like a major cause for concern? (By contrast a poll of 1000 people for the Work Foundation last year came up with 78% claiming they were "very" or "quite satisfied" with their jobs, with about 5% saying they were very dissatisfied with work.) It would be interesting to know how that compares with other professions like medicine and accountancy. That said, whatever way you cut it, the sectoral data does suggest that some parts of the profession are facing potentially significant retention problems.

By the way, nine per cent of those who wanted out would like to teach.

All tomorrow's parties?

It's been results day for our finalists in Warwick Law School today. Lots of smiley happy people... and some rather less so. The bustle of term is coming to an end and a bit of a holiday atmosphere is starting to pervade, well amongst the students at least. We laid on celebratory drinks in the reception area, another School was doing much the same on the grass below my office window, and there was live music outside the Students Union. All in all it seems a pretty good place to be - which got me thinking about what all those happy smiley faces might be doing in three, four, five years from now; whether they'd still be doing law, and still be happy smiley faces. (I'm really not a miserable git, honest!)

Yesterday I was fielding questions in an e-mail from Zara - an A level student wondering about her degree and career options. I don't get a huge number of such e-mails (probably just as well), but I always feel a bit wary of doling out advice and opinions - not least because I think its getting increasingly hard to generalise about legal education and legal careers - and I'm never sure I've pitched it right. The big firms and chambers are great at putting out the glossy recruitment brochures (definitely happy smiley faces there) and doing the milk round to cream off the brightest and the best, and a lot of potential students are clearly happy to be seduced by the status and money. I'm not sure they get to see enough of the other side though - the long hours culture, and the pressure in those organisations, nor the changes we're seeing to high street and legal aid practice, and its potential impact on access to justice. I'm not saying it's all bad, but I do think, as jobs go, there is quite a lot about legal practice that borders on the dysfunctional - indeed sometimes seems institutionally designed to be dysfunctional (but then that's probably why I'm an academic...). When I've taught undergraduates about the legal profession and legal ethics, I've always tried to draw on research that gives the whole picture, to present the problems and challenges involved in pursuing a legal career, as well as acknowledging the plusses. I have no doubt this is sometimes seen by students as an unwelcome intrusion on their perception of reality!

Anyhow, this is what I wrote to Zara. I'd be interested to hear what anyone thinks about my advice:

Dear Zara

Thank you for your e-mail; sorry it has taken a while to respond, but as you will appreciate this is a busy time of year for us.

There isn't an easy answer to your question. The first thing is, whatever your degree, if you are thinking of entering the legal profession (particularly in a competitive, high status/high income, area of work, like corporate and commercial practice) you need a good class of degree - a minimum 2:i, plus relevant work experience and anything else you can find interesting and distinctive to put on your cv (a gap year herding lamas in Peru or whatever it may be!) that will make you stand out from the dozens of other bright and enthusiastic candidates for legal jobs. Consequently I think it is important to go with the degree subject that will interest and motivate you - simply because most people do better at studying things they like than things they don't. That said, where you go to study can make a difference, and you would also be foolish to ignore that: Oxbridge, and a few other institutions probably do give you an edge in most situations. It is debatable how far down the "league table" that edge continues, however. Moreover, the legal profession is becoming more aware of equality and diversity issues in its recruitment practices and that is starting to reduce the power of the 'old boy' (and girl) network.

As for the Graduate Diploma (GDL) [the conversion course for non-law graduates who wish to qualify as lawyers], it's swings and roundabouts. Most firms and chambers, so far as we can tell, don't in any way discriminate against the GDL. Some people say it can give you an edge on the basics - eg you will have finished studying contract only a year before you start training, for most law graduates, that knowledge will be three years old, plus you will have the breadth that studying another discipline gives you. On the other hand you don't get the same depth and range of legal knowledge from the GDL. It is more intensive and narrower than a law degree, and you may have to work harder under training to close that gap. Obviously be aware also that the GDL adds an extra year to qualifying and so adds significantly to the costs (unless you are lucky enough to get sponsorship). With university fees as well plenty of students today are entering training with debts of £25K-£30K+.

From what you say you are unsure at this stage whether to go for the Bar or the solicitors' profession, and that's not something you have to decide yet. What I would say is, don't even consider a career in the law unless you are really motivated to do it. It is a demanding career, though one that many do find fulfilling. At the top end, as everyone knows, the financial rewards are substantial, but you will be expected to earn every penny. On the other hand the future for traditional 'high street' areas of work (crime, family, etc) is rather more uncertain and the rewards much more variable. There are a lot of regulatory and market changes in the offing, some of which will potentially increase competition faced by traditional legal practices. The Bar in particular is a high risk career path these days, with about three BVC graduands currently chasing each pupillage (training place). I'm not trying to put you off, but I think you should know the risks.

I hope this is helpful. Good luck!

IP and communities of practice

I spent a long but interesting day yesterday in Birmingham with a group of Intellectual Property teachers (OK, that may not be your notion of interesting, but, please, suspend your disbelief for a moment, not least because they were a nice group of people....)

The event was the inaugural workshop of the European Intellectual Property Teachers' Network, an informal grouping that has grown out of an equally informal UK-based group that has met fairly regularly over the last six or seven years. The event itself was pretty packed, with two keynotes (from Steve Rowan, Director of Intellectual Property Policy at the UK Intellectual Property Office, and Marielle Piana from the European Patent Academy of the EPO) and four panel sessions. The spread of subject matter was also quite broad, with much discussion of appropriate content, design and delivery: the place of history, generalist vs specialist modules, problem-based learning, virtual delivery, and so on. Interdisciplinarity was a strong theme (music to my socio-legal ears!), recognising the extent to which an understanding of IP policy and practice benefits from, perhaps even necessitates, a strongly interdisciplinary approach. The need to teach IP management skills and issues also emerged from a couple of presentations, including an impressive example from the Technical University of Munich of the way in which student motivation and learning could be stimulated by a deep, problem-based, approach to learning using case studies based on real high-tech companies.

In a way what was most exciting for me was not so much the content (I'm not an IP lawyer) but that the event happened at all, and that it brought together people teaching aspects of IP from different countries, different disciplinary backgrounds, and for different purposes. In my experience its quite unusual to find a group of HE people from across a field of study like this meeting to talk about teaching and learning. There was certainly a sense of interest and engagement in the debates and a willingness to sharing ideas, and I have little doubt that the shared IP context enhanced the feeling of participation in a common enterprise. Full credit to Claire Howell (Aston Business School) and Duncan Matthews (Queen Mary, University of London) for pulling it all together.

The event has got me thinking rather more concretely about something that I've come across increasingly frequently lately - the idea of communities of practice (CoP). The term itself seems to have been coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger and used extensively in their book Situated Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1991). (In a later book -Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1998 - Wenger goes on to explore the notion of a CoP in much greater depth.)

Lave and Wenger's work starts from the supposition that all learning is social and comes primarily from our experience of participating in daily life as a series of engagements with others in joint enterprises. From this perspective, at its simplest, a community of practice is a group of individuals participating in shared activity which is characterised by collective or collaborative learning. This process of “mutual engagement” in fact comes to define both the practice and the community itself. Communities thus develop over time around things that matter to the people involved. They develop a 'shared repertoire' of communal resources and symbols that carry the accumulated knowledge and experience of the group. Rather instrumentally, they interest me because they sound like potentially powerful mechanisms for sharing knowledge, solving problems and innovating.

I'm not sure that I know enough about CoPs yet to differentiate this concept from a lot of other work on organisational learning, but Wenger's sensitivity to social complexity and what seems to be a strongly constructionist view of the world are, for me, intuitively appealing and I think the label itself is quite powerful. At UKCLE we are very much focussed on supporting the needs of our subject community. While I think that's an important focus and a useful shorthand for us, not least to remind us where our primary responsibility lies, it is descriptively and developmentally rather a blunt notion. Even within law as a single discipline there is a multiplicity of more or less well defined 'communities' and interests which overlay what I suspect may still be a pretty individualistic sense of what it is to be a 'law teacher'. Could CoPs be a useful way of not just thinking ('sociologically') about how sub-disciplinary cultures evolve, but a means of actually constructing and developing sub-disciplinary interests and activities? (The Society of Legal Scholars' Subject Sections in the UK - broadly akin to AALS Sections in the US - perhaps perform some of that function already, but probably not all of it). Indeed, can you construct a CoP or is it more an emergent property of a field or organisation? What features appear to sustain and grow a CoP? One of the questions at the end of yesterday's event, not surprisingly was, "what next", and the CoP literature might generate some interesting ideas. I'll try and write some more about this when I have more time, and have been able to do some more spadework!

Higher, wider, further, deeper, oops....

So, Higher Education minister Bill Rammell is prepared to admit that, six years on, the success of government widening participation strategy has been less than spectacular. OK, I admit he didn't go that far, preferring to blame the "scatter gun" approach of Aimhigher instead, (he would wouldn't he?) but come on, a little reading between the lines is surely permissible. The news from the Higher Education Careers Service Unit that a young person is twice as likely to attend university if they have graduate parents is also less than surprising (both items reported in The Guardian Education section 12.06.07) . I draw attention to this not because I'm against widening participation (on the contrary it was one of the reasons I hung on in the polytechnic/new university sector for 20-odd years), but I do think it is a particularly intractable problem for HE institutions to deal with. The middle class 'parentocracy' still win the game for all the obvious reasons - a history of family expectation that normalises a university education, the economic and cultural capital to exploit school and university admissions systems, better access to information, etc, etc, and, if all else fails, the inclination to shout loudly to the Daily Mail whenever they become aware of any university admission policies that could possibly be conceived of as positive action, let alone discrimination.

The problem, of course, is that the solutions are (as we all - including Government - know) much harder and more expensive to achieve than slapping a target of 50% age participation on HE. Effective outreach programmes, summer schools, strategies to target talented and gifted kids, and embedding really effective advice and guidance in secondary schools and communities are massively time and resource intensive activities. Particularly in a context where resources are already scarce, and teachers are often struggling to deal with an overloaded and frequently changing curriculum. To be sure the government has targeted money on WP initiatives, but the data suggest we are still swimming against a tide of relative ignorance and indifference in many communities.

Perhaps even more critically, if widening participation strategies are going to make a material difference beyond university, schools, universities and employers also need to think very seriously about the steps they should be taking to prepare non-traditional students for the graduate workplace. One of the problems we continue to see in the legal profession is the tendency for employers to recruit, on the basis of their social and cultural capital, 'people like us'. Given the relational nature of much legal work, these shared cultural values and assumptions often 'oil the wheels' in what is an increasingly competitive marketplace, but they also act as a powerful exclusionary tool in recruitment processes. The situation is improving, slowly. But my sense is that widening participation strategies need to focus more on what can be done both to develop some of that cultural capital, and to co-opt employers into delivering a much stronger pull effect, to support the push that the education sector is already working hard to provide.

The first steps of a virgin blogger...

Welcome to hEaD Space, my typographically-challenged first attempt at running a blog. Despite the fact its taken me nearly two weeks to get the first post up, my intention is to post at least once a week, initially, to get a bit of momentum, reflecting on things I've seen or read about, or maybe items that have been inspired by the day job at the UK Centre for Legal Education. hEaD Space plans to be controversial sometimes, useful sometimes, and - hopefully - engaging all the time. Given its mostly about legal education, which most normal folk probably don't give a stuff about, that could sound like a bit of a challenge. I hope not. If law is about anything more than making money for lawyers, what passes for legal education and training, what we as educators can - and should - do to engage and challenge our students, and get them to reflect on the values and purposes of law should matter. But its going to be a bit tough to do that in a conversation of one, so please, if you're around and interested, get involved!