The lack of quality assurance for law schools risks ‘breeding a generation of incompetent solicitors’, the head of one of the biggest providers has warned.
Nigel Savage, chief executive of the College of Law, said monitoring by the Solicitors Regulation Authority is not sufficient to ensure that students leave law school with the skills necessary for practice.
‘The SRA only appears to be concerned with measuring outcomes – how many people pass. And some providers are simply preparing students to pass their exams, not for practice,’ said Savage. He called for the return of the league tables that the Law Society used to publish, which graded providers on their performance after visiting them to assess the standard of teaching.
Savage said that, although the tables were not always popular with providers, they provided an objective assessment of the standards of different courses, which was helpful for students and good for the system.
With so many different courses on offer, and new fast-track courses being introduced by some providers this autumn, Savage questioned how students will be able to judge the best.
‘Markets operate on information, but that has to be more than mere marketing puff from the providers themselves,’ he said. ‘If something isn’t done we risk breeding a generation of incompetent solicitors.’
But Peter Crisp, chief executive of BPP Law School, said the SRA’s monitoring was sufficient to enable students to make an informed choice about providers. ‘Students are not fools, but sophisticated consumers. They will recognise quality and go to a provider because of its reputation and brand,’ he said.
Neither BPP nor the College of Law have been criticised for their standards.
An SRA spokeswoman said the quality assurance measures for the legal practice course are designed to ensure high standards of competence among those entering the profession.
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