 Mwneud i ni, dweud i ddechrau flasgysgonydd Gwranithgol Cymru'r 28 i gyfnog ddydd 2018. Ysgolch ynghylch i Moris Corry. Gweithgwch arraweadol ym Mhwyledd ddysgwng ar ymarferwyd. Rydyn ni'n unig i gael ei wneud ar gael ei wneud o'r ddau'r bwysig ym Llywodraeth gyda'r Plygu. Ysgolch arraweadol ym Mhwledd ddau'r ddau? Eryddi'r welwen yw i ddoedd yma meddwl a'r ei wneud hwnnw o diwrnod The committee's first consideration of this topic is an opportunity to explore the issues relating to legal education, including routes to qualifying as a solicitor and advocate, funding and barriers to entry to these professions. I refer members to paper 1, which is not by the Clark and paper 2, which is a private paper. I welcome all of the witnesses to the committee's round-table evidence session and invite them in turn to introduce themselves briefly. I'll start with Margaret Mitchell, convener of the Justice Committee, and if we just go round the table. I'm Tim Haddow. I'm an advocate. I came through the route to qualification qualifying as a solicitor in 2015 and as an advocate in 2016, but I had a particular interest in access to the profession and I campaigned on that issue whilst I was a student and also worked on it while I was the trainee solicitor. Ben Macpherson MSP for Edinburgh Northern Leith. I also took this opportunity to declare two interests, first of all that I'm a registered solicitor and also that during my diploma and just during the diploma year I was also a member of the campaign for fair access to legal profession working with Tim Haddow. My judicial title is Lord Isi. My real name is Ronald Mackay. I'm here in my capacity as the convener of the Joint Standing Committee on Legal Education. I don't know if you would like me to say something about the committee now or should I come back to it later? The Joint Standing Committee on Legal Education in Scotland has been around for a good number of decades, although quite when we were set up with a bit of a mystery, but our function is to bring together the professional bodies of the Faculty of Advocates and the Law Society and the law schools in Scotland in order really that they can do that. We can work together constructively and in a co-operative manner in the interests of legal education throughout. In addition to those bodies, we also have representation from the Diploma Coordinating Committee and we have representation too from the judicial institute, which is responsible for the training of the judiciary and now includes justices of the peace. We are assisted in our work by three lay members. That's a relatively recent introduction to the committee and I have to say that I think the working of the committee has been greatly assisted by the presence of the lay members. We really do appreciate the effort that they present us. That was helpful because when we're having the discussion and bringing people in then you know when it's relevant to bring you in. Thank you very much for that. So my role is really the convener of that rather than presenting a particular interest on the committee. I understand. Good morning John Finnie MSP, Highlands and Islands. I'm Rob Marr's head of education at the Los Southia of Scotland. I'm Liam McArthur MSP for Orkneym, probably ought to declare an interest as a parent of a son who's about to go off and study law. I'm Liam Kerr MSP for the North East region. I also need to declare an interest as a member of the Law Society of England and Wales and Scotland. I'm a current practice solicitor. Importantly, for a conversation on access, I self-funded my way through the common professional exam and the legal practice certificate at the University of Law in London and then dual qualified into Scotland a few years later. I'm Julie Brannan, director of education and training at the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the SRA is the regulator of law firms in England and Wales. I'm Maree Gougeon MSP for Angus North and Mearns. I'm George Adam, Paisley MSP. I'm Liz Cammiford. I was formerly a solicitor in private practice and I'm still on the solicitor's role, albeit non-practicing. My role now is as the diploma director at Dundee University, where I coordinate the diploma in professional legal practice. I'm Daniel Johnson MSP for Edinburgh Southern and I'd also just like to add that my wife is a practicing solicitor having qualified via law conversion in England and then subsequently qualified in Scotland and is, therefore, dual qualified. I'm Rona Mackay MSP for Strathkelvin and Bearsden. Thank you all for that. That's very helpful. It's around table discussion so it's a more informal way of still collecting formal evidence on the topic but allowing for a more free exchange and hopefully to go in different directions that you don't always manage to do if you have a more structured panel on an issue. If you do want to speak then your microphone will come on automatically once you've attracted my attention or the clerk's attention and will bring you in and as usual will try and give us as much and most of the time to our witnesses as opposed to the members although I know they have a lot of questions to ask on that. Can I thank all the witnesses that did provide written evidence that's always tremendously helpful to the committee in advance of holding a formal session and without further ado we'll now move to our first question which is from Liam McArthur. We've had a note in terms of the various stages involved in qualifying as a solicitor and advocate. It would be helpful if some of the witnesses could set out what's involved in each of those stages, what are the key learnings that are attached to each of those stages, both as a solicitor but also as an advocate. Who thinks it'd be best place to give a kind of overview of the training, legal education and training in Scotland? Yes, lost society. The main route that the vast majority of people take is by undertaking the LLB. That's normally four years for an honest degree, it's possible to do in three but the vast majority will do it in four. That's the academic stage to the route to qualification and we set a series of outcomes that require to be taught by universities to be met by students how universities teach those outcomes will be up to the universities. There's a bit of academic freedom for them there. It's important to remember that depending on the university between 40 and 50 per cent of the people who studied the LLB will not go on to further legal study. That may be a decision they take at the start of the LLB. They never want to be a lawyer. It may be a decision they take halfway through saying I wanted to become a lawyer and now I definitely don't. Or at the end, there may be other reasons as well as I'm sure we'll come on to. That's quite an important thing that it's not solely for legal practice. Once you've done that, in that covers, as I say, the academic stage, you go on to study the diploma in professional legal practice. Again, we accredit that and again we set outcomes that require to be met there. Up to 50 per cent of the course is what we call elective, which again gives providers significant freedom to play to their strengths as a provider but also to link into their local market. Perhaps the most obvious example is the universities in Aberdeen that offer the diploma may well tailor their provision to the local energy, oil and gas sectors but all diploma providers do that to their locations. The other 50 per cent that we mandate is core content and that ties directly to the reserved areas of practice for a solicitor, so private client litigation and elements of property and conveyancing. As well as that tax is taught on the diploma, it's taught pervasively, it may be taught at undergrad but it has to be taught pervasively at the diploma and legal ethics also. They may be introduced in the LLB but they are mandated to be taught throughout the diploma. Then there's a training contract, which can either be with a private practice firm from a sole practitioner all the way up to one of the largest law firms in the world or it could be a private and in-house organisation, the biggest single hire of trainees as the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. It's a broad spread. Again, we set outcomes that require to be met over the course of the two years. They're quite broad because negotiations for a large corporate firm maybe have a similar underlying skill to negotiations as a Procurator Fiscal but you don't want to go too deep into it because otherwise it becomes difficult. Throughout that, there are regular quarterly performance reviews. They are required to undertake training continuing professional development and they are required to meet the outcomes and of course be designated by a disclosure check and by their supervising solicitor to be a fit and proper person to be a solicitor in Scotland. At that point, although they can be admitted halfway through their training contract at the end, they're discharged and they are a newly qualified solicitor and they can go off to work and wherever they want in the profession will go to the bar. I don't think that I can speak for how advocates become advocates but Tim can jump in there and show. Before we move on, you said three or four years, is there still graduate entry on two-year course? Yes, actually. There is a graduate LLB, which is two years. Generally, you need to have undertaken a previous degree to get there. There are occasionally exceptions for that if you have significant work-based learning or something like that but on the whole somebody will do an undergrad in history, politics, English, science and then move across to do a two-year accelerated. A number of universities do that. One university now does that online and pretty much all of the parts of the rich qualification are also available to be undertaken part-time as well. That's helpful. It's interesting that people don't always do the degree with intentional practising. It's being looked at generally as a good general degree to have to go into a lot of different professions. Unless any of the witnesses have anything to add to the training, we will move on to the more substantive questions. Tim, do you want to add something? I should say that I am not here to give evidence on behalf of the faculty of advocates but I also can speak to the process of qualifying as an advocate. I think that the first two things just to acknowledge is that the scale of that is very much lower in that perhaps between four and ten people a year train as advocates compared to four or five hundred who would train as solicitors. It's also worth noting that there's a great diversity of people. There's usually one or two a year who come straight from having qualified as solicitors but equally there will be others who will have worked as solicitors for a number of years and indeed some who have worked as solicitors for a very significant period of time and who come to the bar perhaps instead of becoming a partner in a law firm or even having been a partner in a law firm and wanting to do something completely different. So the sort of profile of people coming into the advocates profession is quite different than those coming in at the solicitors profession at the bottom end. Put very simply, the requirements in Scotland to become an advocate sort of bolt on to the top of having become a solicitor. So the law degree requirements, they're not quite identical but they're very similar. You then have to do the diploma, you then have to have qualified as a solicitor. There are some routes around that but they're very sort of few and far between. So generally people do effectively what I did which is go through who do the law degree, the diploma, the traineeship and then either come straight to the bar or go through the practice as a solicitor first. I think the actual process of training as an advocate is that you spend a year, what in England is called pupillage in Scotland we call it deviling. So you work for about nine months alongside shadowing experienced advocates. During that time you receive some fairly specialist and intensive advocacy training from members of faculty and at the end of that if you meet the right standards you're then admitted by the court to the office of advocate. It is worth saying that that period of training you don't have to pay for but of course neither are you paid for doing it. So it is, people will have to plan ahead for that. There are scholarships available and those will be from next year very much enhanced over what they have been up to now. That's very helpful. Before we move on to look at an overview of the education in England and Wales which Daniel is going to explore then Liam, both Liam Sadas? Following on from Rob's explanation it was very helpful and I'm aware that not all universities offer the diploma as well. It would be helpful for me to understand the extent to which there is movement from universities in completely different parts of the country in order to complete the diploma. So that if, for example, you use the example of Aberdeen, whether people with an interest in the energy sector are going to gravitate there to do a diploma or whether the likelihood is that people will do the diploma if they can at the university they've got their degree from? It's courses for courses to an extent. Sometimes people will move away for their undergrads so if you're originally from Glasgow you may go to Aberdeen or Edinburgh but you may return home so to speak to do your diploma either Glasgow or Strathclyde. You're right that not all of the LLB providing universities also offer a credit to 10 LLB providers. There are six providers of their diploma. Obviously that doesn't matter entirely. There is a bit of movement. It may be on an educational basis, it may be because you desperately want to do a particular area of law or a particular elective. It may be because you can live at home and that's cheaper. Some people continue to do Edinburgh or Dundee because they like being there and it works for them. Liz will be far better placed on that. The predominant reason that I see in my role is that students often move back to their home town to undertake the diploma course, which is essentially a year's postgraduate course in order to save costs. That's a common reason for movement. Some people are driven by electives offered by the individual diploma providers such as Rob Sighted, the oil and gas situation in Aberdeen. If that's a particular interest, people are aware of what might be on offer at universities through their websites and often that's a swaying in their decision. Some universities may be more geared to technically and look at using forward, others more traditional. That might be a factor in looking at it. Certainly, we always tend to look at emerging areas of law that are relevant to giving our diploma students the best job opportunities in terms of going into practice where they are locally. Just to be clear, in Scotland, if one wants to become an advocate, you run the standard process to become a lawyer that Rob Marr has described. You then do your two-year training contract with a law firm, let's say, and then you will decide, can I afford a one-year unpaid deviling with a view to becoming an advocate? If I'm right on that, that contrasts heavily with the England and Wales situation, doesn't it? If one is running through, instead of doing the LPC, one decides to do a barvocational course for a year and then two years of pupilage, one year of pupilage, unpaid. The unpaid period runs throughout your legal education in England and Wales in a way that it doesn't in Scotland. Is that it? I'm not particularly familiar with the system in England, and maybe Ms Brandon can help. I think that the pupilage now there's a mandatory sort of minimum award for pupils. The pupils will receive about £12,000 a year during their year of pupilage, but that the bar practice training course, which I think is the new name for the bar vocational course you mentioned, that costs around £16,000. In Scotland, you don't have to do the course, but you will already have paid to do your diploma. The difference is that a lot of people don't come straight to the bar in Scotland, and that's not just because they can't afford to do so, although that might be a consideration for other people. As Roper said, horses for courses, some people want to work as a solicitor first. Sometimes they develop their interest in advocacy as they go through their profession. Other people might want to do it straight away. Other people might have family or other reasons for doing it or for delaying coming into the bar. In the year that I called as an advocate, there were three of us who had been qualified through the Scottish Listers route. I had come straight from a trainee ship. One of my colleagues had done three years in practice and then two years working for one of the judges. The other of my colleague had been in practice for about 15 years, and bizarrely had been his trainee when I'd worked in the law firm, and we then doubled together. It's a very much horses for courses. Having had that outline of how one can qualify in Scotland, I'd be interested to do the compare and contrast with England and Wales, both in terms of the academic requirement in that university portion and the equivalent of the diploma. It's also the postgraduate route, so just how that compares in comparison to Scotland. Could I perhaps ask you, Julia, for that? Yes, certainly. Broadly, a very similar structure at the moment. We also have a tripartite system. We have the academic stage of training, which is either a law degree or another degree, and then the common professional examination, as Liam described. Then we have for solicitors the legal practice course, and as you've heard, for barristers the BPTC, and then we have a training contract. To give you a sense of the numbers coming through, certainly on the solicitor side, as is well known, the number of students in England and Wales has increased enormously in recent years. There are now about 26,000 law students starting each year on a law degree, and there are about 5,000 to 6,000 training contracts at the end of that process, so you can see the funnel. You have to add into that the fact that we have a large number of people coming through the non-law degree route, particularly going into the elite law firms, about 50 per cent of the people that they recruit into the big city law firms on non-law graduates. It's very, very competitive to get those training contracts at the end. As I'm sure I'll go on to describe in a moment, we are proposing a very radical overhaul to that system, where we will have a national licensing exam called the solicitors qualifying exam, that everybody will take regardless of their route to admission, and we will no longer specify particular pathways that people have to follow. How does that compare to Scotland in terms of the 26,000 to 5,000 training contracts? Is that a similar funnel or is it a narrower funnel in Scotland? Similarly, my understanding that currently in England, essentially, it's a one-year postgraduate qualification before you do your legal practice certificate, whereas it's two years in Scotland. Can someone just explain to me why that's the case? The numbers are not comparable. The rough numbers, when people ask us, are around 1,300 law students commenced across the 10 providers each year. Obviously, there will be some level of attrition over the course of the four years of people dropping out of a degree, which happens in all degrees to some extent or other. We generally think that it moves around year on year, but a good rule of thumb is about 1,000 law graduates each year. The diploma last year, 612 people started, I think. Of course, you don't necessarily do one following the other, you may take some time out, but just for the numbers. Last year, there were 540 training contracts, which has been remarkably similar over the past four years. The number of training contracts has been between 530 and 550. Who knows what will happen in the near future? If you look at the funnel, so to speak, it's not comparable. Of course, the reason for the disparity in university places is that, as I understand it, in Scotland, places at university are capped, whereas in England they are not capped at all, so universities can recruit as many people as they want to go into their courses. Indeed, we have a number of Scottish universities, including Dundee, who offer what we call a qualifying law degree for purposes of admission as an English solicitor. You can go to a Scottish university, do a degree in law in a Scottish university and then come south of the border. We recognise that degree and qualify as an English solicitor. Can I just also ask us about the solicitor's qualifying exam that's coming in? You said that that sort of agnostic about the route. Are you saying that, literally, you can do whatever you like as long as you pass the exam? You're taking the bar exam in the States. Is that the idea? In a nutshell, it is absolutely the idea. I've described the most common route to admission as a solicitor in England and Wales at the moment, but we have a large number of routes. What we've tried to do is to inject some flexibility into the system by having alternative pathways to admission. Of course, we have the overseas route to admission as a solicitor. The problem that we have at the moment is that each different route to admission has its own assessment. We can't justify having different assessments for admission depending on the route that you have chosen. Instead, we need one single system test to check that people have the competencies to practice safely as a solicitor. We will have a requirement that, by the time that you are admitted as a solicitor, you have to have a degree or equivalent qualification. We do expect that practice as a solicitor will continue to be predominantly a graduate profession, as it has been in the past. It's never been an exclusively graduate profession and it will continue not to be an exclusively graduate profession. By focusing our regulation on a really rigorous assessment at point of admission, we can inject flexibility into the routes of pathways to admission. We can, for example, have people qualifying through apprenticeships, which we've already started. There will be greater opportunities for people to learn while they earn and so on, greater flexibility, but we will have a better, more rigorous check of competence at point of admission than we have at the moment. My colleague John Finnie is going to come back to that point, but can I just quickly get the view from Scottish colleagues? Is that the idea of having a test rather than looking at the means of how people arrive there? Is it something that the Scottish legal profession looks on with envy or revulsion as an idea if I can put it globally? We tend to deal with things like, we don't tend to say envy or revulsion, but we've engaged very positively with the SRA on this. We've responded to, I think, three consultations now on this and we've put our views across. At this stage, we have no plans to mirror what the SRA are doing. Obviously, we watch with interest what is happening south of the border, but it's not our direction of travel. I would say that we are a professional body and there are many cross-border entities now that will operate in both jurisdictions. We haven't seen any significant push from anyone really to go down that route. That isn't to say it's wrong to do so. It's just to state the fact that we're not being pushed in that direction. Where our members are keen to innovate, as I said in my written evidence, is that they are keen for us to create a truly alternative route. There are elements of the route to qualification that can be alternative, but to create a truly alternative route via means of entrepreneurship to route to qualification. Large sections of the membership are keen to do that. We're keen to do that. We consulted on that last year. We have no real plans to go down the single or two-stage assessment of SQE1, SQE2 or that model, but in terms of an apprenticeship, we'd be very keen to continue that. We're speaking to Skills Development Scotland about doing just that. It could be a very well-qualified chance for this one. I would like to say that, of course, the committee is very aware of what is being proposed in England. We've given it my careful consideration. I can say that none of the constituent bodies are in favour of going down that route. There are a number of reasons, but if we just take one of them, one of the drivers for this in England and Wales is, seemingly, the great variety of routes and qualifications. Therefore, they see that there are inconsistent standards. That is a situation that really doesn't exist in Scotland. The structure of the legal profession and the organisation of legal education is, we've just been learning, very different. There's a long tradition of close contact between the law schools and the professions. I'd like to think that the Joint Standing Committee has paid some part in this, but we do operate on a constructive and co-operative basis. The Law Society of Scotland then leads the faculty in a sense audits what is being done in the universities through the accreditation means. That way we achieve, I'm not saying that everything is identical, but we do achieve consistency and quality in the standards. Of course, as between the law schools in Scotland, there's a fairly rigorous system of external examiners. In a sense, they are checking up on each other. That's one particular reason why we don't see this as a good idea. It sounds a little bit as though the single system test is almost coming to a lowering of standards because people have come into the profession from so many different routes that aren't available in Scotland. I'm not sure what I'm saying. I'm saying that one of the principal reasons that I understand it in England and Wales is the apprehension that there are varying standards and inconsistency both in the level of teaching and in the rigor of the marking standards. I'm saying that we don't have that issue. I don't think that there's any perception within Scotland that there is a great variety of standards between universities. I'll bring Julianne because I would have thought that the test was rigorous enough, regardless of how you'd come into profession. Perhaps that wouldn't be a concern. Just to give a flavour of the concerns that we have over standards, we know that we have variable pass rates on both the CP and the LPC. At some providers, pass rates are as low as 50% and at others, they're as high as 100%. We don't actually know whether 50% or 100% is a good thing. There could be a number of reasons for that. It could be a different calibre of students, it could be better or less good teaching, it could be more difficult or easier exams and we don't know which of those it is. About two or three years ago, we did call in all the exams on the LPC so we could look at them and try to get a sense of whether there were differential standards. On the face of it, it looked as though there were. I should add just to give members an understanding. There were about 26 different legal practice course providers. We looked at each of the exams of the 26 different legal course providers. It looked as though there were different standards in the exams. Some exams looked easier than others. We couldn't really tell that because we didn't know how the students had been taught. We didn't know how the teaching related to the examining, whether the questions on the exam papers were really very different and novel compared with what they had been exposed to in the teaching. It's very difficult for us to get a grip. One of the issues that we've got is that we think there may be differential standards but it's very hard for us to tell. It's hard to know for sure. We think that the single exam will give us a much better grip on standards. We will know that everybody has been assessed to the same standard because everybody will take the same test. To pick up on the question of external examiners, there's quite a lot of interest amongst the regulators of higher education in the QAA, the new office for students, about the external examining system. There are some concerns about the extent to which that is effective. We know that universities tend to select external examiners from the same sector in which they operate. Although external examiners are required to make a statement that the standards in the university where they are external are the same as their home university, that's only a bilateral test. I think that there are some questions and I think that the regulators are looking at the extent to which that is a robust system. Liam McArthur, did you have a comment? I'll ask this, but I might support what you're saying, Lord Ease. I'm not right in thinking when I was selecting where to study. This is about getting a training contract, it seems to me. At the end of my studies, if I want to become a solicitor, I have to get a training contract. Certainly when in England and Wales it was clear to me at the time, and this was a long time ago, I'd accept, but where I got that training, the LPC from, would probably have an impact on where I could expect to get a training contract. I'm right in thinking, Lord Ease, that because you've only got 10 providers in Scotland, that analysis is less likely to happen. As far as it doesn't matter where I go, the law firms are saying that it will be of a standard, it will be of a certain way. I think that's really what it comes with. I could also say that within the committee we do have considerable reservations about the notion of the test of a single exam. I think that there's a concern that there's more to becoming a sound lawyer than just sitting on an exam. It's the exposure to the academic discipline and the study of legal thinking that will make for sound lawyers. We do actually need sound lawyers. There's an apprehension, which I think is shared also south of the border, that if you set up this single exam, which I think is to be largely computer organised, you end up with crammers teaching to the exam and those who are concerned that that would not provide the real measure of assurance of quality for the future profession. I think that I'd share the reservations that have been expressed around the table by the Scottish witnesses at least. It certainly doesn't seem to my mind to be the scale of problem there is with the diversity of provision. We're talking about six providers rather than 26, and I don't think that there's any evidence about this difference in quality or pass rates at least, which may mean a difference in quality between the providers. I don't necessarily see an advantage of taking that assessment process away from the universities and giving it to a third party, which I think is effectively what is talking about happening in England. Equally, I think that there is one aspect of the new system in England, which I think is commendable, and it does seem to be less tied to the particular structure of the route to qualification. I think that it is an issue that the primary route for people coming through is in some ways quite prescriptive. For instance, you pretty much have to do the diploma, then you have to do the two-year traineeship. For instance, when I was going through the diploma process, there was a person who'd worked their way through, from being the office boy in the solicitors firm. He'd been there about seven years. He'd gone through his law society exams, so effectively that allowed him to reach the legal qualification without having done a law degree. To get to the next stage of qualification, despite having worked in a legal office for seven years, he had to leave his job and come to the diploma to learn about how to work in a legal office. It's not just about that, but that's part of the process of the diploma. Then, of course, he had to go and do a traineeship to learn about the practicalities of working in a legal office. He's already done that, or indeed, for people—I was slightly in this situation myself—I had 19 years working as a professional in another profession. Some of the skills that I required to work in a legal office, I already had in terms of working in an office, being a professional, that sort of thing. I didn't have some of the legal bits and pieces, but because the current structure is very much a lowest common denominator, it assumes that everybody is starting from that fresh-faced, graduate position and has to then follow that particular structure of diploma plus traineeship. The commendable bit about what the SRA is trying to do is to say, well, let's go away from having to jump through particular hoops and let's just assess on the outcomes that you get to the end of that. I think that we could perhaps take some aspects of that process, agnosticism, I suppose, about how you get to the standard from the English proposals. There are aspects of that without going the whole hog to do what the SRA is doing. On that example, Lordeithie, you were shaking your head vigorously before I bring Robyn, so you wanted to qualify, maybe? Or I think it was the clerk that had worked in an office for so long yet still had to do the diploma? There's a problem, in a sense, with people who worked in the particular field they acquired knowledge, but there's also the other side of it that you need to be, I think, anxious to make sure from the point of view of public protection that people are adequately qualified. If I can take perhaps an analogy from medicine that we may have someone who's worked in a paramedical capacity for a very long time is very knowledgeable, but I think that the public would still like to know that they have actually gone through the same proper route for qualification. There's a balance, in effect, which is sometimes quite difficult to draw between making access easy and yet maintaining the quality. Does your committee have the flexibility to, if you like, waver the rules given an individual case? No, we're just a co-operative consultative body. So we can argue about it, and we can make suggestions, and we can encourage things. Indeed, one of the things we have been looking at and trying to encourage is the development of different routes to qualification, for example, perhaps easing the requirements for traineeships and improving the opportunities for traineeships. I think it's fair to say, although perhaps a little contradictory, that the Law Society has gone to great lengths to try to open up the traineeship market, encouraging smaller firms, encouraging the public sector to provide traineeships and to making that easier. Also, as was mentioned, there's an effort to try and develop the apprenticeship model as a way of... So we're not averse to developing other means of qualifications. I've got Rob, Julia and then Liz in the order. Super. Just a few points. I think it's useful to note, Daniel asked, about the funnel beforehand. It's useful to remember that we are very different jurisdictions and very different educational jurisdictions. We have 10 LLB providers. The SRA, so far as I'm aware, are over 100. I think over 110. Regulating 110 academic institutions is just more difficult than regulating 10 and then subsequently six in the way of the diploma. I can tell you how we accredit and continually monitor providers, but perhaps Liz, as somebody that we accredit and monitor, might be better at doing that from that side. The points that Tim makes are fair. We are looking at how we can make processes more flexible. As I've mentioned, the apprenticeship group is something that we are exceptionally keen on, and that isn't me sitting in Morrison Street thinking it's a good idea, it's the profession asking us to do so. Thirdly, in terms of promoting traineeships, the biggest single change that we are looking to do this year is to rewrite the admission regulations, which we are currently doing. We are the body that sets the admission regulations with the concurrence of the Lord President at the Court of Session, but one of the things that we would like to do, subject to necessary safeguards being put in place, is to allow trainees to be admitted earlier in the training contract. If they were able to do that, particularly small criminal defence firms would be more able to take on trainee solicitors. At the moment, if you are a criminal defence firm, if you take on a trainee solicitor, they cannot appear in many court matters until point of admission, which at the present time is at its earliest of one year. If we could move that earlier, that is just uneconomical. Of course, there are huge public protection issues there, so we would have to put in safeguards in place around that, but that is one of the things that we are looking at under the new admission regulations, which we hope would make a difference. Of course, there are hoops that are jumped through, and the Lord President has to agree. I thought that it would be helpful to describe the nature of the assessment. As Rob said, the SQE will have two stages. The first stage will be a test of legal knowledge, but the second stage will be a test of legal skills. That will not be a computer-based assessment, it will be a skills assessment, role-plays in relation to advocacy, interviewing, testing the candidate's ability to pick up a case, to understand what the legal and factual issues are, what the risks are to the client and so on, as well as tests of legal writing, legal drafting and legal research. That is the nature of the exam. The point that I wanted to go on to make was that we do think that the SQE will assure standards better, and, again, to pick up Lord Ease's point, when we talked to members of the public, three out of four of the people we spoke to when we did an opinion survey said that they would have greater confidence in the solicitor's profession if they had all taken the same exam. We do think that there is a public confidence issue around this, and they told us that they would be more confident in an SQE-type system. We also think very strongly that the SQE, a standardised exam, enables us to address the barriers to access in the current system. It is really critical to issues around access. The two issues around access that we have identified are the cost of training in the current system and who gets training contracts. Cost of training, Tim mentioned £16,000 for the BPTC. It is now £19,000, Tim. I know that it is very hard to keep track of those things, because they go up. It is £16,000 up to £16,000 now for the LPTC. That is an enormous cost on top of the cost of a degree. We are going on to look at barriers. I understand that your comments are very much looking at the system in England as it operates just now, and the test on addressing that. To move back to the diploma and some of those comments. Ably made the point about numbers and scale in terms of providers, six providers of the diploma in Scotland, ten providers of the LLB degree, where I understand that there are around 110 providers of the degree in England and 26 LBC providers currently. How that translates in terms of numbers again to give a sense of scale in terms of the profession, I think that there are about 130,000 solicitors in England and Wales currently and there are 11,000 in Scotland. I am happy to speak a bit about the accreditation process in terms of the involvement with the Law Society's regulators. We certainly work very closely with the Law Society who prescribe our learning outcomes in both the LLB and degree, and every year we have to apply for re-accreditation in order to provide the course. That is a fairly detailed process involving a very long submission of a report generally around 30 pages about the work that we have been doing in the previous academic year based on feedback, external examiner reports that will have to be required to be submitted to the society. Those are scrutinised in some detail by their education and standards committee and we receive a report on their terms, drawing our attention to any points, both in terms of good practice, which are shared with all the diploma providers and things that perhaps ought to be addressed in the forthcoming academic year. We work very closely with them. I think that the close liaison between the universities and the Law Society is a very well-regulated profession. I like to think that, in terms of the trainees that are sent out into legal practice, they are regarded as very well versed in what they ought to be doing and that that is ultimately in the public interest. To move on to the flexibility issue that was touched on, John. Thank you, convener. It has been touched on a few times here and I particularly had a question for the Law Society around a recent consultation, Alternative Roots to Becoming, where the quote is, the route to qualification is not particularly flexible and does not promote equal access as well as it might. Equal access, of course, as you know, is a concern across various portfolios in the Parliament here. I wonder if you could expand on that, maybe say why you take that view and indeed what other panel members think. Finally, if I may, convener, if the Law Society can explain how the current more flexible way to qualify work, for instance, the pre-peat training contract. I am very happy to take it in reverse order, if that makes sense. Pete is the official name for the two-stage postgraduate process of the diploma and the traineeship. Pete 1 is the diploma and Pete 2 is the training contract. Nobody outside the Law Society's offices continues to call those two elements, those things, but it's important because our view is what you learn in the vocational stage of Pete 1, the diploma you build upon and hone in the work-based stage of the training contract. If you look at the outcomes of those two stages, they very clearly map across. There will be negotiation and one negotiation and the other, but how those will be assessed will be slightly different. The pre-peat training contract is something that Tim alluded to before. You can work in a legal office for three to four years. It differs on the individual and takes a series of Law Society and Scotland examinations. At the end of those three to four years, you have essentially reached the academic standard of the LLB. Tim is correct that you go on to do the diploma and then most people will return to their original place of work or they'll do the diploma part-time and continue working. Could that process be smoother? Of course it could be. The difficulty that we have is that that is a very, very small number of people who take it forward each year. I can take Tim's point entirely that comparing the English Advocates profession, the English Barristers' profession and the Scottish Advocates profession is difficult simply because often there's four or five people in Scotland, maybe four or five hundred south of the border. People doing the pre-peat, if there's more than ten in a given year, that is a bumper year. We're typically talking five, six, seven people at most. Typically, those people are already working in legal offices. They're the court runner, they're the paralegal, they're the secretary and the solicitor says, actually what you could be a solicitor, let's put you through these exams, put you on this training contract. I have never seen anyone advertise for that role. So when we talk about equal access, I suppose, law is a high tariff, high value degree and profession. We know that although there are contextualised admissions at many universities, which should be commended, we know that talented people may not be able to access the LLB even with contextualised admissions, but could be fantastic solicitors in due course. So could those people be better? Could they be solicitors if the route to qualification is slightly more flexible and if we had a truly apprenticeship route? Certainly, we think so. We know there are access issues throughout. Tim and Ben and others led on the campaign for fair access a number of years ago. That made us do a number of things slightly differently. One of the things that came out of that was the consultation with the profession on different routes to qualification. In the consultation, there were a number of suggested alternatives, and we said to the profession, what do you think? Do you want an apprenticeship route? Do you want, for instance, accredited paralegals, which is a status that we give to paralegals who can prove to us that they meet a certain standard? Should there be some sort of articulation process for an accredited paralegal to become a solicitor if they so want? We shouldn't all think that a paralegal is a frustrated solicitor. Many of them are very happy being paralegals. But could that process exist? As it happens, the profession came back massively in favour of the apprenticeship route, less in favour of the other options available in that process. That's why we're focusing our energy on an apprenticeship route. Would that make access more equitable? I would hope so. I suppose the proof of the puddings in the eating. That's the main one for me, but hopefully that makes a bit more sense of the pre-peat training contract. Perhaps exploring the apprenticeship route a little bit more, Daniel? I'm just very interested to know how your plans lie in terms of developing an apprenticeship. When is that likely to be rolled out? What will that potentially look like? I'm assuming that it's a graduate apprenticeship model. If you can maybe just go into that in a little bit more depth. The consultation happened. We looked at the responses and it was quite clear that the profession wanted to go down. We went to the organisations that had responded and said, It's all very well saying, in theory, that we are in favour of an apprenticeship route because everybody is. But will you, if we create such a thing, actually employ apprentices to do this? I'm happy to say that a number of private practice law firms and in-house legal organisations have said they would be keen to scope that out with us and be keen to work with us. Where we are at the moment is we're speaking to SDS, Skills Development Scotland, about how we do that. A modern apprenticeship should be a graduate apprenticeship, but at the moment I think we're leaning towards a graduate apprenticeship, how that would work, as any other apprenticeship would work. A number of years' experience, probably five or six, I would say, five or six somewhere around there, and a series of examinations and assessments throughout their course. More than that, there's not been too much, but we have got real sector buy-in to take it forward. Indeed, some of the universities have said that they could play a part of that in terms of the assessment out of the way or the academics out of the way, which are an important part of an apprenticeship too. So it's an exciting development. I can't say at this stage when it will occur, because we don't know. I wouldn't want to have a guess, but hopefully as soon as we can get everyone in line to do it, because we think it would make a huge difference. I suppose it is worth noting, though, that there are only so many legal jobs in Scotland. A difficult conversation, and it will be me, will have to have with law students in due course if we create an apprenticeship route. It is likely, after a few years of an apprenticeship, that there will be fewer training contracts. If I'm Mars and Co and I take ten trainees in a year, I might take three apprentices. I probably don't need ten trainees and three apprentices. So the profession may be slightly more diverse, people may access it slightly differently, but we're not going to magic up jobs, I don't think. So that's a difficult conversation we're going to have to have with the LLB and diploma cohorts in due course, but that's not a reason not to do it. It's just a reason, something that we have to be aware of. On that point, there's a real risk that when people talk about apprenticeship routes in any profession, not just the legal profession, they assume that by dint of having an apprenticeship route that that will automatically broaden access. Where in reality, sharp-held or middle-class kids and indeed their parents will go, actually there's less training contracts but have you looked at that apprenticeship route and actually you just get the very same people going into the same profession, albeit by a different route? And I think there's some evidence of that with some apprenticeship routes already. Are there any sort of thoughts that you've had at this initial stage about how you can use this to genuinely widen access rather than essentially providing alternative route to the same cohort of people? It's a great question. It's not something we've given an enormous. Given where we are in discussions with SDS, that's something we haven't given too much thought to, but it's an entirely fair point that if you have numerous routes in the same people, you may try different pathways. At the same time, there is evidence from jurisdictions that having multiple pathways into a profession, all that leads to informal hierarchies forming so that, of course, you can go to that route, whatever route, but actually if you don't go to this university and this provider of training, be it law or another profession, you're not actually going to go forward in the same way everyone can stay at the Ritz as long as they've got the fee to get in. Julie, you wanted to comment? Yes, just to give a sense of how the apprenticeship model is working out in England and Wales. We launched it in 2016. We had 25 apprenticeships starts that year on the Slisters apprenticeship. We had 100 start September 2017 and we're expecting numbers to go up again this year. The firms that offer apprenticeships are really evangelical about it. What they say is that it enables them to form the apprentices in the competencies, skills that they need for their particular business. Those apprentices become very loyal to the firm and it enables firms to hang on to talent in a way that they like. In picking up Rob's point about fewer training contracts as a result of apprenticeships, I was on a panel with Wumblebwn Dickinson, one of the firms south of the border recently, and they said that they had cut their formal training contract places by 20 per cent to make space for people coming through alternative means. I think that there is some evidence that that will happen. I was on a panel yesterday with another firm who said that they have increased their number of training places to add apprenticeships to the training contracts that they had. There is a difference of practice there. I am picking up the point about Sharpel, Elvord, middle-class people taking the apprenticeship routes. I am sure that there will be some of that going on but anecdotally what we see in terms of the sorts of people taking up the apprenticeships at the moment are, first of all, predominantly working-class people who are more likely to be worried about the fee debt in England and Wales. They do not want to have the large amount of tuition fees. They will go down to the apprenticeship route. They are people who have the choice of going to university or going down the apprenticeship route. They have the grades to go to university but they choose the apprenticeship route because they avoid the tuition fees and that tends to be more of a worry for people from working-class backgrounds and middle-class backgrounds. People who, sometimes for ethnic reasons because of ethnic cultural reasons, want to stay at home while they are working. We see that model as well. I will ask what the profile of the firms offering those apprenticeships. Are we talking about Magic Circle? Is it a national full service? It is a very good question. The Magic Circle, the top five to six law firms, tend not to be offering this list of apprenticeships but we have the big national law firms who are offering them and smaller firms as well. The other thing to pick up on Rob's very good point is the idea of a hierarchy. For us, we were very concerned about that different perception of hierarchies according to which routes you followed. That is something that we think is addressed through the Slyster's qualifying exam, the level playing field, everybody who comes through qualifies as Slyster will be able to say, I have taken the same exam and this enables me to demonstrate I am the equivalent, the equal of my peers. I wonder, Liz, if you had any thoughts on the apprenticeship perspective, from a university perspective, how would that affect or would it affect the universities? It is hard to know, I think that there will always be an appetite to come and study. The traditional route. Jenny, moving on to another aspect that has been covered. Thank you, convener. Rob Mars, I want to pick up on something in your submission with regard to barriers to access. You point to your 2014 report on fair access to the legal profession, which acknowledged that pupils from SIMD 20 and SIMD 40 were disproportionately less likely to even start an LLB than their welfare counterparts. I would just like to ask more generally than panel members, why is this still the case in 2018? I mean, so far as I am aware and this does not make it right or wrong that the position for law is the position for many courses across the university sector that people from SIMD 20 backgrounds are less likely to commence the university experience, that is probably more likely to be the case in subjects such as law, medicine, et cetera. That is what we identified in the report as the biggest single barrier. Clearly there is a bottleneck at the end of the diploma getting into the training contract. Clearly there are access concerns at the diploma. How I described it when I spoke publicly on the fair access report was, in many ways, the reach qualification is a triathlon, the first bit is a swim, the second bit is a cycle and the third bit is a run. Lots of people give lots of effort and time to whether or not people can afford the bike. My focus in the report that came through fairly clearly was that we should really be focusing on the people who can't swim because if they can't get in the pool they're never going to get to the diploma anyway. Why is it still like this in 2018? There are any number of things, the attainment gap in schools, that we inherit as all universities and professions inherit as inheritors of inequality. On top of that, I know that the university is doing a huge amount of work in this regard. It's fantastic to see so many universities undertake contextualised admissions, and we've worked fairly hard in the area that we can do to make sure that practice units or those who take trainees understand what contextualised admissions are. There is no point at university saying, well, we're going to look at the whole individual, which is clearly the right thing to do in terms of access to university. They do their degree, they get a first at the university, they apply for a training contract, and the training contract says, well, you need X number of UCAS points. We've worked quite hard with the profession to say, you almost want to forget why you look at school grades at all, but it's actually pernicious if you look at school grades when we know that most of the universities, if not all of the universities that provide the LLB, are contextualising admissions in. There are access issues down the line, but I'm sure others will have a view on why it's still like this in 2018. Any other views around the table? No? Can we bring Rona in and ask a specific question? Oh, sorry. Thank you. I'd also notice from your submission that the Law Society has wanted the Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation, which funds eight students from poorer backgrounds. You've got seven pupils there who were a free school meal entitled, excuse me, there were eight EMA recipients, there were three young carers, so I'm quite interested in the breakdown of those pupils. I recognise that you're also hopeful to increase this cohort to 40 going forward. I just wondered how did you identify those pupils in, did they have to apply for the scheme and did you target the skills perhaps that were benefiting from the Government's attainment fund, because there's obviously a wider agenda here around closing the attainment gap, and you mentioned that in your previous response. We tried to get that out in front of as many eyes as possible. We didn't want to hide the LawScot Foundation away, but we worked with the schools that we worked with through street law, through the Donald George Memorial debate, through the various universities with the reach and pathways to the profession programmes. We promoted it via social media in all sorts of ways. I don't want to say that we did go to the scheme that you mentioned in case we didn't, but in the future we absolutely will. We want as many people knowing about the LawScot Foundation and benefiting from the LawScot Foundation as the charity can support. I'm happy to say that the first year there was eight remarkable young people, and then next year it will be eight, so over the course of the years it will be 40 when you add them all up. If we continue to raise funds from the solicitor and advocates profession and others, we'll take anyone's money in that regard. We will try and support as many pupils as we can. It's important to note that it's not just finance. Finance is really important. We have set each individual up with a mentor for each year, and I think that mentor will change over the course of the five years, because then at that stage they will be beginning to form a network and legal profession which is hugely important. The mentors who have come forward are from the highest offices, the legal officers in the land, down to newly qualified, giving their time freely, and they add so much value. We're going to continue doing that, and we will get it out to as many schools as many eyes as possible, because as many people as possible should benefit from it. Thank you. Daniels. I just want to ask a supplementary base on what Jane Galwith was asking. I was referring to a previous point where we talked about the funnel. Is the very fact that only 10 institutions offer the law degree pre-screening the number of people who can actually do a law degree and therefore go into the profession? To use your swimming analogy, it's not just one-handed. It may be that some people can't swim, but it also is that there's a limited number of places to take part in the race to begin with. Is that maybe part of the problem? Potentially. If there are other universities in Scotland that do not offer the LLB, if they wish to do so, there is no market bar to the mentoring. They would have to come forward to be accredited by the society, but we don't say that there is a limit of 10. In the relatively recent past, Sterling also offered the diploma. They chose not to do so, but, as I say, there are four or five universities off the top of my head that don't offer it. Could they offer the LLB if they met the standards? We would accredit them. I'm just conscious that in my nine years at the Law Society, the thing that I hear most often is that there are far too many law students, so if we then explain, which I'm not actually sure is the case, because of the point that I raised earlier, about the 40% to 50% who go off and study other things anyway or do other things anyway, but I accept that perhaps more universities could do that, but that's a business and academic decision for the university. It would be entirely improper of us to turn around to a given university and say, you should offer the law degree. If they didn't do that and they think that it would serve their local community and fits in with their long-term strategy, and they meet our standards, there would be no reason not to do it. My question is whether or not the Law Society should be seeking that, because my impression is that in England there are a lot more lower-tariff universities that offer law degrees, whereas in Scotland it is pretty much the domain of the higher-tariff, dare I say, more elite universities that offer law degrees. Is there any possibility there in terms of opening up access? I wouldn't want to comment on the tariff or otherwise of a given university. All I can say is that the law schools that come forward to us require to meet an initial accreditation standard and continue to do so over the course of their accreditation period until they choose not to do so. Others have considered it in the past. I'm bound by how much I can say there, but it's entirely up to them. We are neither prone or against. We regulate as we see the right way to regulate. I have a quick point that I wanted to make. We may come on to this in further questions about the structure with the diploma sitting as a postgraduate qualification after the LLB. I'll pick up on Rob's analogy about the triathlon that you need to be able to swim before you can think about buying the bike. I think that I would just make the point, though, that if you are a pupil in fifth or sixth year at a school and you are not sure about whether law is the career for you, you are going to be looking ahead and when it's explained to you, well yes, your tuition fees are paid for the Scottish Government for the LLB, you get your student loan, but come the end of that, you will have to pay for your diploma. That will be a disincentive at all, I think. I do think that, whilst I totally accept the inheritors of inequality points, being able to tell people at school that there is a structure that they can go through without having to inject lumps of cash at the postgraduate level will be something that may help people who might be on the cusp of deciding whether they want to be a lawyer or not, that that's something that they could do. I do think that the diploma structure on costs issue does have issues right back at the beginning as well as for those when they finish the LLB. That's something Rona wants to come in, but I know Julia does. Does the open university, is it starting LLP courses or has someone told me recently that they were starting? University offers an LLB, but that's an English and Welsh LLB. Right, Julia. King up on this point about universities. I think that it's not just opening the number of universities that offer LLBs. It's also then a question of who gets recruited into training contracts at the end of the process. We see in England and Wales that first of all, although we've got 110 universities offering LLBs or qualifying law degrees, as we call them, only about 19 per cent of training contracts go to people outside the Russell group of universities. That statistic is mirrored by a piece of work that Hefke did looking at or the Department of Education looking at the earnings of law students by university five years after they graduated. The top university by earnings was Oxford, where five years out there law graduates were earning an average of £61,000 a year. The bottom was the University of Bradford where they were earning I think £1,000 a year. The big question is how do you encourage the law firms to recruit bright talent instead of just relying on the university's reputation as a proxy for talent? We do hope that the statistic qualifying examination will help with that. Just to follow on, Tim, from what you were saying, technologists have been an increase in student support but you are very worried about the negative effect that having to pay for the diploma will have. In contrast to that, the law society said their data shows that those from the lowest income backgrounds are just as likely to start the diploma as those from Advantage backgrounds so I'm wondering if there's a wee bit of a disconnect there what would be the reason for that? I suppose I can only speak but I'm not done. I don't have access to the same level of statistics that the law society do in their position as the regulator. I did certainly when I was doing the campaign I ran a survey and I can't claim that it was scientific but of over 100 people within my diploma course and tried to reduce that data back to SIMD sort of numbers and it did seem to me that there had been a drop-off between the LLB and the diploma but those were within the limitations of what I could achieve as a student and I accept that the law society has better access to statistics than I do. It seems to me obvious that a financial barrier of the magnitude of having to pay for the diploma must be a disincentive for people who are worried about the level of debt that they've got or who don't have access to funding to help them through that or to avoid them taking debt beforehand. When I was involved in campaigning on this issue the level of student support for the diploma was about £3,400 I think and that's against a cost of studying of perhaps the fees were £7,000 then and the same again for the cost of living so there's a big gap about £10,000. I do acknowledge that that student support is now much better than it was £10,000. The diploma fees at Edinburgh are over £8,000 now. The Scottish Government's independent report on student support suggested that the £8,000 in a bit was the sort of living wage for a student so we're talking about £16,000. So there's still a £6,000 funding gap and there's two questions there I suppose. The first one is is student support the right way to fill that gap? Is there going to be more money that could help with that access issue and even should it be the Government, the public purse that is filling that access gap? I think my view is maybe it shouldn't be. The diploma exists for a very good reason and going back into the history of it is because a traineeship by itself wasn't delivering what the profession needed and what the public needed and the social society at the time made the decision to introduce the diploma and I think that was probably the right decision at the time but there was no access issue then because it was fully funded. It is not anymore and there's a question as to whether it I suppose it even should be. Compare it to other professions maybe accountancy or other professions where it's just a progression and there isn't that all of a sudden you hit a funding hurdle. It seems to be a bit out of kilter but I don't know what you think of that, Rob. To go back to your initial point regarding progression, I can't speak for people who in S5 or S6 find out about the route qualification and here there is a diploma that they require to pay for and a traineeship and choose not to do the LLB. We have access to statistics but we don't have access to people we don't know exist. I'm not denying they exist. It's just really difficult to find that out. The closest we can get because of course the LLB takes a number of years people might take time out upon graduating people might do a masters whatever it may be what we did a number of years ago was we just asked the 10 LLB providers and the diploma providers for statistics and when they didn't give us the statistics because it wasn't actually part of the accreditation requirements we just put in freedom of information requests so what we looked at was the number of SIMD 20 and SIMD 40 students who commenced the LLB in a given year and then five years later and I accept it's not perfect we looked at the number of SIMD 20 and SIMD 40 people who commenced the diploma because we think that the vast majority of people do four years and then go straight on to the diploma and what we found for the three years that we found data for was that actually people from SIMD 20 and SIMD 40 backgrounds were slightly more like and it was very slightly but slightly more likely to do the diploma than their more advantage to the counterparts now I can't say that there are some people who from those backgrounds who choose not to go forward because of finances and clearly that's to be addressed but the years that we did that analysis for and with the caveat that it's not perfect actually there didn't seem to be any drop off rate over the course should more people from SIMD 20 and SIMD 40 backgrounds or should they be better represented on the LLB absolutely I think everybody would agree with that in terms of how the training works could it be done in another way could it be done like accountancy yeah I mean there's lots of ways to create a professional route qualification right now I suppose it's best done by an anecdote having focused on statistics it might be best done by an anecdote I was on a panel at the Royal Faculty of Procurators last year and the motion for the debate was this house believes the route qualification is not fit for purpose sorry it is fit for purpose so a sheriff stood up and said actually the quality of newly qualified lawyers have ever seen the chairman of one of Scotland's largest independent firms stood up and said I have issues with the route qualification but on balance the trainees that we get on day one are of really high quality and at the end of our training we hope they're of a higher quality and then Professor of Law Dundee University was slightly more critical and gave us a qualified fit for purpose I thought I'd gone along to be the law society patsy where everybody just sort of had a go at me and threw tomatoes but then the three people in front of me all said we were actually turning out high quality lawyers which is the primary purpose and then there's a really important secondary purpose if you like is access there are access issues with all professions regardless of how you put the process together if you move to an accountancy model there are issues with the accountancy model if you move to the medical model which is five years undergrad and then training are there issues with hours yes as we're discussing but at the moment we feel things are improving somewhat and in terms of turning out high quality new lawyers that is something we're doing would that not suggest that the legal profession is to some extent raking in the benefits of students who are having to pay and then get you know as a trainee that much money and the law firms are getting a very high which is good obviously the training is going well but does it not suggest an imbalance you know that the law firms and perhaps universities are getting a lot of money from students who then go on to become skilled in the profession but at a low cost to the profession is there not a an imbalance there to an extent a paper each year for the recommended rate of remuneration for trainees and each year trainees around the country would be delighted to learn that I almost always suggest an increase whether or not the law studies council agrees with my recommended rate increases in a different matter but I have never written a paper that hasn't suggested an increase so at the junior end of the profession that pay is an issue particularly when you look at other professions particularly when you look at the city that are there the important thing I suppose very similarly to Tim's point about the difficulty with the advocates profession is on the one hand deviling is unpaid but on the other hand you are getting fantastic training which you aren't paying for so in the same way the trainees must do in terms of graduate salary are perhaps lower than other at the same time they are getting a high quality professional training during that two years whilst being paid the issue with the diploma I see your point entirely unless and until we move to a model more into teaching where the state picked up far more of the financial costs that's I think where we are but at the moment that's where we are Liam if you come in with your supplementary I'm slightly disturbed by Rob's reference to a comparison of the teaching profession where in a sense the state will pay because the state is providing the education that is then delivered I think that the point you make in relation to training is well understood I think that it's not unique to law that you have in a sense with the expectation that on the back of that you'll receive the training that will enable you to earn more in future I think that the concern is that with a diploma which is a professional requirement the expectation to date has been that the state picks up the tab for that in a way that doesn't happen as you've acknowledged in other professions accountants he's the one that's most often cited and I think at times where budgets across the piece are under more strain I think that it's expecting the law society to move on from the consultation that you've had nobody doubts that there are many options there that there may not be a unanimity of you across law society members but an expectation that at least recognising where public finances are at the moment there'd be a willingness to engage in a model that eases some of that pressure that's on the public purse at the moment is that not unreasonable? Can I perhaps add to that a little bit? You keep saying the aims of the current system is to ensure high standards absolutely and lawyers that are fit to practice the law now we're in a very changing society economically depending on your financial crisis or moving forward to the challenges of Brexit industry will have certain needs so at what stage do the law society and those people give their accreditation and say well have we moved with the times are we back in jurisprudence of the very original still teaching that because yes it's the basic but are we also moving forward in that to address the need that industry has now for the proper legal advice from properly trained people to move on and see if there's a way to encourage that because as you say in the profession there are a limited number of criminal lawyers that are needed perhaps commercial to an extent the staching on that has it moved forward with the times to look to see if it's fit for purpose? I'm delighted to say yes in 2011 we reformed the ritual vocation the biggest single change there was those of you who qualified on the table will remember that the old elective system was on your diploma you had literally an elective choice where you did public admin or company and commercial so if you're going off to GLSS or the crown you did public admin and everybody else did company and commercial but now up to 50% of a diploma is elective content so that still has to meet certain standards that gives university providers so much more over the last two weeks one of the annual plan objectives for the society is to ensure content of the ritual vocation is up to date we held a number of round tables with academic and diploma providers and practice units both in-house and private practice on topics including tax at the moment that's almost entirely taught in the diploma is that correct? How do you judge that? How do you judge if you got it right? We listen to our members and we listen to the academic providers all the time we hear people saying we feel that the trainee's coming in are light on this or heavy on that or good at this or perhaps could be better at that tax changed in 2011 five, six years on, seven years on now it's right to say what's that change can we evaluate that? Do you go to the firms that would be seeking tax advice or the clients that would be seeking and saying I find it difficult to get? I wouldn't delineate that because tax is taught pervasively because tax is pervasive so I suppose the way I'd sum it up is we need all tax aware lawyers we don't necessarily need to create lots and lots of tax lawyers although I presume Perhaps not but let's not get carried away but for instance if you're a private client lawyer you're going to need to have a knowledge of tax if you're doing domestic conveyance you're going to need a knowledge of tax if you're doing company and commercial you're going to need to know about business taxes and so forth the biggest single transformative change in legal as with all other sectors will be the impact of technology and whilst most of the LLB providers and I think all the diploma providers are doing more in legal tech we've said could we change our outcomes on technology there are already some to make that more reflective of practice now and in the near future Tim and then Ben this is a subject we're probably discussing today because I thought that was going to be interesting oh sorry Liam did I did I paraphrase what wasn't right sorry I hadn't so in terms of my teaching analogy was simply I couldn't think of any other professions where there is a postgraduate diploma and then a role so the closest although I accept that it's a state professional on the whole whereas we're a private professional on the whole although there are a good number of our members who go on to work for the state central government or the crown so for us I'd never considered it from that perspective previously in terms of should we create a ritualification because of the financial burdens of the state I'm not sure that would be the primary motive on how we would create a ritualification although obviously we have to be cognisant of what's going forward I've said previously when law firms have said the ritualification could be shorter or something like that you could do a three-year degree you could do a three-year law degree but the practice is in Scotland that people and the market and clients presumably want honours but it is entirely possible to do a three-year law degree and that would reduce in some ways the cost to the public person as well because it wouldn't be a fourth year of the LLB answered your question or not quite I'm not entirely sure that it does I mean there has been a debate about moving from a fourth or three-year degree across the piece not simply in relation to law I mean I'll be guided by others in terms of what is part of the academic requirement and what then is as we were being told at the outset the purpose of the diploma and how you weave that either into the degree or you have it as part of the training thereafter and therefore it is captured in the part of the process where individuals will be earning something if not a huge amount and therefore the burden is not shouldered so much by the state by the public parts Tim and then Jolie I think it's important to just make the point that the cost of the diploma isn't the only issue there is also the fact that most people who start the diploma do not start it knowing that they've got a traineeship at the end and they can't know that so it's undertaken by about I think that Alice's figures were about 70 per cent of people who start the diploma do it speculatively effectively hoping to then get a traineeship I think Rob's figures from both sides is 80 per cent of people at the moment to do the diploma do get a traineeship so that means 20 per cent don't so there's not just the cost issue there's that risk point as well so again if you're in that slightly more financially precarious position of am I going to invest a year of my life and this money in doing this when I don't know what the outcome is going to be that I think is a barrier as much as the traineeship and I think I I just want to pick up on a couple of things about the diploma itself I think I fully accept that there needs to be some sort of external educational input to that professional training that's currently provided by the diploma but my question is the diploma best way of doing that we've heard that 50 per cent of the diploma is elective well that's sort of a tacit admission that half the diploma isn't actually required to start at day one it's good to have, nice to have good broadening education but it's not required for day one we talk about it being a year of course to start in September and are finished by the end of March it's actually six months so could some of those be taken and broken up and put into the same or a longer traineeship and that's what we had proposed at one point previously was to do your traineeship during the day but doing the diploma at the same time because you can do a part-time diploma but the one job you can't do while doing a part-time diploma is being a trainees' listener just picking up on Tim's point around picking up on the point about the length of law degree and also the electives one of the things that we have discovered since we proposed the SQE is that universities are looking at integrating the professional stage of training into their law degree so that we will have instead of four years to admission three years and actually some universities I'm aware of one university who's even looking at a two year route to admission and one of the things that we have done is we have removed the requirement for the study of elective subjects for exactly the reason that Tim suggests and we can do all of this because we will keep a grip on standards the standard through the SQE will be objectively and independently assessed so we can make sure that people are at the right level for safe practice but if universities think they can get through this in quicker time in shorter time then it's open to them to do so Elizabeth The proposed model if you like that effectively firms can somehow provide the diploma training part at times am I picking up that incorrectly in terms of compressing that into I'm not suggesting that the training is provided by the firms, the academics training is provided by the firms but I think and I don't know I'm not an expert on this but in the accountancy model then people who are doing their accountancy traineeship will go and do the educational part which could be the universities but they would do it week at a time or day at a time not for six months I just wanted to point out the kind of intensive rigor of the diploma currently in relation to the core subjects I think we're giving students contact hours to cover the core subjects of about 24 per week so I think that that would have to be looked at in terms of any kind of proposed model and the demands that professional firms now make on trainees to effectively ffiernan and create funds for them and that's the subject that we're discussing today because Ben has been very keen to look at it so you finally get to ask your questions Ben Thank you convener and thank you all for contributing so far it's been interesting to go through the subject and to hear the different perspective from England and Wales as well I guess I would start from the point that the reason all sorts of different people from different backgrounds going into and qualifies as solicitor in Scotland do the diploma in legal practices is because in the vast majority apart from the various less popular and certainly less numerous other alternative routes and the fact that apprenticeships might become more prevalent is interesting and welcome from my perspective but the fact then in the status quo that the vast majority of people have to go through the diploma is because they don't have a choice you have to do the diploma in order to qualify as a solicitor in Scotland and yes I've absolutely recognised that this is creating quality graduates to then go on and undertake traineeships but as has been stated it comes at high cost and to the state and the private individual and with risk in terms of getting a traineeship at the end so I think what interests me more than anything else and has done throughout this process and when I was doing the diploma itself where you do do quite a lot of courses that you end up not using in terms of which avenue you may go into to practice in whether it's criminal or civil for the state or for a private firm the the point is being made that we could have a three-year LLB but equally I've thought for some time that you could also have a three-year traineeship that integrates with professional training through the academic institutions with collaboration with the profession where the profession is contributing to the high quality trained solicitor that will come out at the end of this process rather than the private individual and I think that's the place where this debate needs to go to is how our very wealthy successful organisations appreciate for smaller firms it might be more challenging but certainly for big firms how are they contributing to this process and should they be contributing more that's the question that I would like to pose and hear more about what Tim proposed about the integrated approach because I think that's where this question lies Rob. I'm bound to an extent by what I can say on it I'm the secretary to the education training committee that looked at this previously a number of organisations came to the society and looked to propose an integrated PEAT model which as Ben says would merge to some extent the deployment and the training contract where that it took some time in terms of going back and forth between the groups and the committee where that got to I looked over the notes last night was that the committee agreed to occur but had a number of questions about how that could occur in the end the firms involved one dropped out and the others chose not to pursue that from the questions that were raised by the committee were reasonable and as I say they agreed to do so because they were subject to those concerns being met so clearly the committee although committees change their membership all the time of course but I'm sure if that came up again they would look at it again and fairly again and they would consider it in the same manner and if the questions and the concerns they had about how this impacted people and so forth were answered they would take that forward and run either a pilot or more widely but the point that I missed earlier on was the cost to the state yes there is an initial cost to the state but the state is not giving people money it's giving people a loan I don't know the figures because this is a relatively new loan but it's sadly for us all when we take out a loan we have to pay it back so over time that shouldn't cost the state that should be returned because I know people default on loans but on the whole that's how the system should work I suppose just to follow up on Ben's point we often receive comments for instance why did I need to do criminal law because I was going off to a commercial firm that's particularly true of people who re-qualify into Scotland people who are commercial partners in England and Wales and want to re-qualify into Scotland heaven forbid that a corporate client may want to advise on laundering money or money laundering or health and safety matters which would both be criminal and so forth but ultimately there are reserved areas to be solicitors, people want to be solicitors and it's entirely appropriate that the public at large think that the solicitors should at least have a grounding in the areas that are reserved to them once you qualify as a solicitor you are technically only competent you can work anywhere and again whilst we would hope that people would not make poor professional decisions to go off having done a corporate traineeship to work in criminal defence law and be inculcating them that that would be a very bad idea ultimately they are only competent at that stage unless we move to some system of sectorised practising certificate which I think would be extremely problematic for many people and for many reasons why we have that broad back base so in terms of testing alternatives the society has listened on the one occasion that it got quite far in the end the firms chose not to take that forward I can't speak to why they made that decision but the committee is within its rights to ask reasonable questions about our new route to qualification our tested route to qualification and then Tim just a piece we can I agree that there is advantage in the omnicomtency in that wider understanding in terms of the solicitor who then qualifies I guess I was just making the point that is there an efficiency and while keeping that breadth of knowledge but a greater collaboration between integrating practice and professional training through the academic institutions and with a potential extended traineeship give advantage to both where you continue to learn in a broad way but also in a focused way where you are applying that knowledge on a daily basis as well as your professional and academic progress and just on the point of the cost of state I absolutely recognise that arrangement is a loan and I think that's the right proposal I guess I was just being cognisant of the fact that in the past of course it was a grant and I'm stating that I don't think we should go back to that place but no point well made Tim, then Julia and then Lord Daisy I think on the integrated approach I completely agree that there's lots of advantages to doing that and I think the feedback between people doing something academically and then doing similar things in their office and bringing those two experiences together is very important I think it also eliminates at a single stroke this question of the barrier caused by the structure in that if you're selected and recruited into one of these integrated traineeships if that's what they become then you know you've got a traineeship and of course you're then earning a salary so even if there isn't a government loan you know you affirm me pay for it or you may have a salary out of which to pay for your own training and again I think that's what happens in accountancy some of the bigger firms will pay for their trainees to do their training others will have good salary and expect them to pay for their own tuition and exams so I think there are a number of advantages to that integrated approach and on the particular proposal I think our feeling from the people producing that proposal was that the level of detail that we were being asked to give of a scheme that we were designing ourselves was just completely too much that was being asked of the firms and that's why I suggested that it was a risk aversion really and I think my disappointment was that we had education and training professionals from free of Scotland made law firms saying yes we can do this and the committee effectively didn't accept that so that's really going back to the law society but I'll bring Julian first and just to say that south of the border it's been possible for many years to do a part time training contract and a part time legal practice course so we do see people doing it it's not an integrated programme between the two in that sort of model doing a training contract getting some time out of the office and going and doing their legal practice course either at weekends or in the evenings or indeed during the work day and it doesn't seem to have caused any difficulties Lord Easy Yes I want to points if I could just mention briefly convener firstly on I think at the earlier time there was indeed grant support for a limited number of diploma students of your campaign and certainly at that time myself and the vice convener of the committee had meetings with the then cabinet secretary for education and the review was taken in government at that time that one wasn't making an exception for law and that it should be equiperated with other professions where there was a postgraduate vocational course such as education and indeed I think since then the loans just seem to work better than the grant for many people the next point they're not necessarily all related is on looking at it from point of view of education for lawyers in general it's quite important in my view that one builds in adaptability for the future the fact of the matter is that when you bark in law you don't really know where you're going to end up at and you have to adapt to many different situations and looking back on my past I can say that very little of what I learned at least much of what I now know and have operated on both as a judge and as an advocate was new material but which I was equipped by the general study of law and finally for the moment anyway I think maybe the only person in this room was old enough to remember when there wasn't a diploma because indeed when I qualified there was no diploma and can I say that I think if no one would want to go back to the situation before it was unsatisfactory both for the universities who found themselves trying to teach a little bit of practice and it was very unsatisfactory for the profession because the quality of training that was provided by what was then called an apprenticeship was very very variable depending on one's apprentice master as they were known there were very few apprentice mistresses and so it is something which is very worthwhile retaining it has made a great improvement to legal education in this country okay and Rob I know I had my hand up but I probably said too much already well with that can I thank all the witnesses very much for what's been a superb round table we've gone lots of different directions lots of food for thought lots of reassurance during in some respects so thank you all very much for attending and can we suspend now briefly for a comfort break and to allow the witnesses to leave agenda item 3 is to ask the committee's agreement to delegate to me to pay witness expenses for the round table under rule 3, 12, 4, 3 that's the round table we've just had are we all agreed? thank you 4 is consideration of a negative instrument this is the act of sederant fees of solicitors in the court of session sheriff appear court and sheriff court amendment 2018 SSI 2018 oblique 186 and I refer members to paper 3 which is a note by the clerk but before I invite any comments from the committee can I just say that having asked the clerks about this particular SSI and in the context of the discussions we've had in the conveners group generally about the notes accompanying these SSIs and how easy it is to understand in layman's language exactly what they're intended to do then this is a prime of example of what shouldn't really be happening the point has been made to officials and the clerks I've asked them to bring it up with the officials that when we're looking at these SSIs then it should be clear what the policy intent is what the SSI is intended to do and that should be clearly set out for committee members to understand or for any of the public who may be looking at the SSI to understand and that point as I say has been made to officials so on the back of this particular one I've asked the clerks to write the Lord President and the Minister of Parliamentary Business making the general point that we expect these SSIs to be accompanied by a clear explanation about what the instrument does and why and this is a particularly important issue because there is no doubt that in the coming weeks and months the number of SSIs we will be dealing with in fact every committee will be dealing with is going to increase substantially so I think the point really must be made now that in relation to the SSIs that the Parliament will update the statute book because of the UK decisions to leave the EU we're aware this is an issue that's going to grow so a letter will go to the Lord President to make that point about the clarity easily understood and about the general raising awareness about the general point that these SSIs are going to be a bigger factor in our business dealing with it we already deal with a large number in this committee and the clerks really shouldn't have to be making phone calls and spending time trying to determine exactly what the SSI does and with that can I have comments from members Daniel Thank you I'd just like to make one broad comment and I understand that this SSI is making provision for a 5% increase in fees across the board and I'd just like to make the general point that court fees can present an access to justice issue we've seen above inflation increases in fees for a number of years now and while I understand the need for the courts to recoup their fees and I also understand the decrease in the number of cases brought forward I do think we should note that this can be an issue for people and that should be borne in mind in the future Any other John? I would absolutely echo what Daniel has said there and I think we need to be vigilant about this it's not something that we see in replicated and salary increases and the like but I'd also like to make a passing comment about your earlier remark in general about SSIs and this is a situation that has come up in other committees so it's not simply from the Lord President's office I know you're not suggesting that but in the past you would look to an explanatory note to explain increasingly they seem to replicate what it says in the the SSI which is less than helpful and I think your comment also about the public watching these proceedings you know of course we understand that there will be some highly technical legal matter to understand the generality of what's being proposed there and if we have any questions to them they'll be deeper so that's very helpful The committee has already or the clerks have already taken up the point with Government officials so the Lord President is the next person in our sights. Very briefly convener I may not be understanding your point Daniel Johnson entirely but this SSI to some extent it goes towards the clarity I read it as the applying only to the fees of the solicitors in an award of expenses at the end rather than the court fees that are levied to access So I was just a bit confused by Daniel's point Gail will give complete clarification I think that is the case Yes that's the case so this is about the tables that the court used to determine the award of a solicitor's expenses at the end of the case rather than the court fees that individual litigants have to pay for the different stages of court proceedings So it's not necessarily an access to justice issue I mean in terms of I suppose the litigants saying okay what am I in the hole for at the end of this potentially I concede that point Well I think it just demonstrates the point that that was not clear in the briefing papers that we got you know if we're asked to pass these SSIs I know exactly what we are being asked to pass it must be absolutely crystal clear so thank you for that More generally if there is court fees issues going up there has been a tendency for that to happen your point is well taken but perhaps not relevant for this SSI So with that are you content not to make any recommendation with regards to this SSI other than the general point of view Thank you for that agenda item 5 is feedback from the justice subcommittee on policing of its meeting on 21 June 2018 following the verbal report there will be an opportunity for brief comments or questions I refer members to paper 4 which is not by the clerk and ask John Finlay to provide feedback Thank you convener the justice subcommittee on policing met evidence on Police Scotland's digital data and ICT strategy and also took further evidence on the Police Scotland's use of digital device triage systems which are also known as cyber chaos and that evidence was taken from Kenneth Hogg the interim chief officer at the police authority David Page deputy chief officer Martin Lowe acting director of ICT James Gray chief financial officer and detective chief superintendent Jerry McLean head of organised crime and counter-terrorism from Police Scotland and the subcommittee heard that the ICT strategy excuse me is much bigger than the previous I6 programme in terms of scale and investment and the Police Scottish Police Authority Board is to consider the strategy again in the autumn when it contains more detail and greater clarity on costs the subcommittee also considered the level and detail of scrutiny that was undertaken by the Scottish Police Authority before investing in cyber chaos with a view into introducing their use throughout Scotland and I think it's fair to record we're disappointed that there had been no impact assessments undertaken before the two trials or as part of the consideration to expand the use of cyber chaos because we're now assured that these are being compiled and will be enroute to the subcommittee for scrutiny so and these assessments were a privacy impact and data assessments from Police Scotland about cyber chaos and the subcommittee also considered its forward work programme and I agreed to write to the Police Authority and Police Scotland about their joint decision not to make ex-Gracia payments to the four officers affected by the counter-corruption unit investigation and the subcommittee will meet again on the 13th of September I'm happy to answer any questions Thank you John, do members have any comments? Daniel? Just one brief comment which I made at the Justice Subcommittee meeting itself is that the scale of this investment will make it one of the largest IT projects to be undertaken within the public sector in Scotland and indeed more broadly within the UK and as such given the issues of the past I think that the IT investment programme does merit further scrutiny not just by the subcommittee but maybe we all want to consider that the committee as a whole needs to take at least a very least a watching brief if not more scrutiny over The committee will be undertaking post-legislative scrutiny on the police and fire bill anyway and how that's operated in the last five years so I've no doubt a lot of issues will come up including this but there was certainly a little bit of concern more than perhaps a little bit of concern about the scrutiny of this particular project and if there wasn't a case of cart before horse really so something that I think given the value of the contract as Daniel says needs a watching brief are there any more comments if not then that concludes the public part of today's meeting our next meeting will be after the summer recess and it's currently scheduled for Thursday the 6th of September when the committee will hold its scheduled session with the secretary of state for Scotland on Brexit and justice matters so only remains for me to wish on members and staff clerks a relaxing and stress free recess and we now move into private session