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.