Elizabeth Polding - School outreach programmes and legal employers: how do school outreach programmes promote the solicitor apprenticeship route to qualification as a lawyer?
This report examines legal employers’ school outreach programmes, and how they promote access to the solicitor apprenticeship as a route to qualification as a lawyer. The report focuses on early career opportunities and advice in relation to the legal profession, but the potential barriers to access also apply to other professions.
The social profile of the legal profession has also been criticised as unrepresentative of the social make up of Britain, with significant overrepresentation in relation to legal practitioners with private school backgrounds. In order to address issues of access to the legal profession and to create a ‘non-graduate’ route into the profession the solicitor apprenticeship was introduced in 2015 following a comprehensive review of legal education. However, the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives (CILEx) non-graduate route into the profession has long been available, and there are concerns that those accessing via this route are not regarded as having parity with graduate entrants.
For this research, a qualitative approach was taken to explore the experiences of employers engaged in school outreach. Semi-structured interviews were adopted for employers and combined with a review of publicly available information on schools (for example, Ofsted, local authority, and government data) involved in the initiatives. In examining the question of how legal employers’ school outreach programmes affect the promotion of the solicitor apprenticeship as a route to qualification as a lawyer, a number of key themes have emerged which are discussed in this report.
