Today Charon talks to Peter Crisp, Dean of BPP Law School, about the new power to award degrees. Peter explains why BPP did not talk to The Today programme the other morning and explains BPP plans for the LLB and LLM. He also addresses issues raised by others critical of the new powers awarded to BPP and expresses his vision of the future for legal education.
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Listen to Podcast 26: Peter Crisp on the new degree awarding power enjoyed by BPP
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Follow up podcasts on this theme:
Consilio | Podcast 28: Richard de Friend College of Law|Podcast 27 Giles Proctor, Nottingham | Podcast 26 with Peter Crisp, BPP | Podcast 25 with Nigel Savage, College of Law
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Filed under: Editorial, Law School, Law Students
Mr Crisp makes an impressive pitch in many ways. My key criticism is that he talks about the value of research focused on problems in practice, but says that BPP will not pursue what he calls ‘purely academic research.’ Many employers of trainee lawyers appear to favour non-law graduates, because a rounded liberal education is a wonderful foundation for excellence as a lawyer. It is pity that that in this one respect Mr Crisp has turned his back on the values both cultivated in universities since the Renaissance, and espoused (in action if not word) by 21st century law firrns.
Dear Mike
I just heard the podcast on BBP and the College of Law and their new powers to award degrees. As a lecturer who teaches law in three universities I find myself in disagreement with my union UCU in its protests about this.
I have taught in a number of law schools over the years and for a large part of it continued in legal practice in criminal trials. I therefore had the benefit of exposure to the academic providers views on legal education and the gospip of those in the two professions who are the eventual recipients of graduates of the traditional academic institutions.
The long and short of it is that for many years legal education has been subject to market forces and that the law schools are seen by most in the professions as being in a ‘league’. The premiership division of this league can assure that most of its students will go into the professions if they so choose, the students of those further down the pecking order face much stiffer competition.
The professional training of lawyers is carried out almost exclusively in the private sector with commercial expediency being the main concern. What is at all wrong with the academic part of the aspiring lawyers education coming from there as well?
BBP, the College of Law and those others who seek to provide legal education in the private sector will be joining the current ‘league’ of providers. They will be subject to the same pressures to ensure that their ‘product’ in terms of both academic content and student quality measures up.
However un-PC it may be the legal professions do not see law schools as equals. The selection process for applicants for training contracts often starts with the lawyers looking at the venue the student attended with the degree classification second consideration.
Good luck to the new private sector providers, their presence in the market can only improve standards.
Barry Turner
Lecturer in Law
I was interested to hear what Nigel Savage and Peter Crisp had to say about the increasing width of degree offerings to law students. The only thing I would add at the moment, and I ought to declare an interest as a holder of the London external LLB taken over three years (albeit while working full-time), is that we now seem to have an LLB that can be awarded at the end of one, two, or three years of study. However intensively study may be organised, and however much credit may be given for prior learning, I can see a degree of confusion here. The GDL does, I grant, cover more than a normal one year of undergraduate work but can that, even where candidates have a doctorate in other subjects, be equated to an LLB gained after two or three years?
One imagines that employers or others , however sophisticated, are going to be puzzled but for most they will be more concerned about having a person who has satisfactorily completed a BVC or LPC. I can see a justification — and many will hate this — for employers preferring graduates from Oxbridge and Russell Group universities. It’s just that the education there tends to be more personal and to be more testing. Contact is not in seminars of 20 students.
I have also always been puzzled as to why law firms seem to ask about A Level grades, except that it offers a privilege to those who have been to good schools which have intensive and expert teaching. London’s open access policy is good but, more to the point, its degrees are, I believe, hard to earn and hence well-respected. At the new university where I teach, the undergraduates must, under a modular system, apply themselves consistently in that they have exams and coursework assessments at regular intervals during the semesters. It’s a different type of pressure but one that more accurately replicates the world of work than the sudden death fight of finals.
I certainly have no fear that the ‘private sector’ will move towards lower standards as that would be to cut their own throats. We all compete to attract the best students, and especially those frankly lucrative overseas and full-cost payers. As David Cameron says to Gordon Brown, ‘Bring it on’. We in the ‘public sector’ — something of a misnomer, anyway, — are not afraid.
Richard Ramsay
Senior Lecturer in Law
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