Who wants to be a lawyer?
The law remains an elitist profession - with the vast majority of those at the top educated at private school. But a new programme to help state pupils get a foot in the door aims to change that. Sophie Morris reports
Published: 12 April 2007
Today Cherie Booth's Filofax must be stuffed with the phone numbers of the rich and famous. You will no doubt find that it contains Cliff Richard and the Clintons, Nelson Mandela perhaps, Bono and Bob Geldof, certainly the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, and other Law Lords - all picked up on her way to the top as a human rights barrister.
You may laugh at her networking, but the Prime Minister's wife deserves praise for fighting her way to the top of a notoriously elitist profession. "I know from personal experience," she said recently, "how difficult it is to enter the profession from a non- privileged background. The problem was not just lack of money although this was a big obstacle, but also the lack of contacts who could help to find you work experience and mini-pupillages."
Cherie Booth works at the Bar but getting a job at one of the country's top solicitors firms is just as much of a struggle. The top five City law firms are known as the "Magic Circle". Between them they employ several hundred graduates a year, but many students think that the doors of this hallowed club, where qualification salaries are in the region of £60,000, are closed to them.
These students have a friend in Sir Peter Lampl, the millionaire philanthropist and chairman of the Sutton Trust who had a hunch that winning a job at one of these law firms was not just down to good exam results and work experience placements. More valuable, he thought, were the contacts necessary to secure such work placements, the confidence to apply to the best universities, and to take on the added debt burden incurred by studying law.
His hunch turned out to be correct. According to the Sutton Trust's research into the educational backgrounds of top lawyers, three out of four top judges, over two thirds of leading barristers and more than half the partners at top law firms attended private school. However, 93 per cent of the population go to state schools.
"As far as barristers and judges were concerned, we were not surprised at how few had been to state schools," says Lampl. "With solicitors we had hoped to see some changes."
Thankfully Nigel Savage, chief executive of The College of Law, who left school himself at the age of 16, was keen to widen access to the law ahead of the Sutton Trust's eye-opening research. The two put their heads together and badgered law firms for their support. The result is a scheme called Pathways to Law which aims to identify potential lawyers while they are at school and cultivate their interest in the subject, giving them the practical help to apply to study law at the best universities. The College of Law has pledged £1.25m over five years, to be shared between five universities. The Sutton Trust will put in £250,000 and oversee the project.
"It's the biggest project we've ever had of this type," explains Savage. "We'll be organising summer schools at The College of Law and working with the universities on their campuses throughout the year as well."
The five universities - Manchester, Leeds, South-ampton, Warwick and the London School of Economics - are each to be partnered with a nearby College of Law. They will choose their students from the worst performing schools, and from low income households where no family members have attended university. The universities will nurture them, through a programme of careers days, work placements, law seminars and advice sessions. The ultimate goal is that the pupils who sign up for Pathways at the age of 15 or 16 will be accepted on to the best law courses around the country, and go on to train as lawyers. Eventually, it is hoped, they will surface at a partners' meeting at Clifford Chance, say, or judging a criminal trial at the Old Bailey.
Each of the five universities will choose 50 children a year for three years, which means around 750 will have received some assistance by 2010. If all of these were to gain training contracts, they would represent 12.5 per cent of the 6,000 lawyers who begin the two-year in-house training programme in solicitors' firms each year.
Although pupils in the five target cities won't hear about Pathways until the autumn of this year, a pilot scheme rolled out at Edinburgh University is already producing similar budding lawyers. Rothna Shah, now 20, thought she wanted to be a lawyer before she had any idea what the word meant. Her parents brought her to Scotland from Bangladesh when she was a toddler and she attended Drummond Community High School in Edinburgh. There were just 30 students in her final year at school, of whom 10 went on to higher education. Yet - and this is key to the Sutton Trust's intentions - few of the 10 went to the sort of red brick universities whose names might count for something at the best law firms.
Shah enrolled with Pathways when she was just 12 and is now in the penultimate year of a law degree at Edinburgh. She is considering whether to train as a solicitor, but first she has to secure a summer work placement. Luckily for Pathways' new incumbents, The College of Law is to employ a dedicated work placement officer.
While Shah struggles to fix her own work placement, she has watched classmates fix theirs at dinner parties, something her own parents, who run a small delivery business, cannot arrange for her. "I always used to think it didn't matter who you know; now I'm a little older and wiser," she says.
By working with The College of Law and the Sutton Trust to provide work placements, solicitors firms such as Clifford Chance, Halliwells and Addleshaw Goddard are actively encouraging a different type of applicant.
The Bar is lagging behind somewhat. Bar Council chairman Geoffrey Vos QC announced several initiatives to widen access in February, including a work placement scheme for gifted students from state schools and loans to help students from less-privileged backgrounds find the £13,000 needed to study for the Bar Vocational Course.
Last week, Lord Neuberger, who has led the Entry to the Bar Working Party, reiterated the need for these measures, saying: "The fact that the Bar is a very competitive profession certainly does not mean that it should only recruit from the social or economic elite. The Bar should be open to all, and the Bar has to play its part in ensuring that it is."
Ten to 15 years ago, the social make-up of lawyers seemed to be diversifying, but that did not last, according to Douglas Thomson, the Sutton Trust's development officer. "It is difficult to pin down what it was attributable to," he says. "There was a theory it was when grammar schools closed or changed, though actually it was a bit later than that."
The window probably closed as university entry expanded in the Nineties, and those entering the top universities, from which the leading law firms recruit, came disproportionately from more prosperous backgrounds.
Whatever the reason, that's almost a generation of missed opportunity. The hope is that the new measures will prevent another lost generation.
Independent Offers
A-Z site map
Indy 100 prices
MORE: Travel podcasts
SAVE: Travel offers
FREE: Email headlines