“I know from personal experience” Cherie Booth QC said recently, “how difficult it is to enter the profession from a non-privileged background. The problem was not just lack of money although this was a big obstacle, but also the lack of contacts – family or friends who could help to find you work experience and mini-pupillages.” As we know, she made it and so did Baroness Kennedy. But how many excellent would-be barristers have fallen by the wayside? Can the Bar Council, Barristers’ Chambers, Inns of Courts do much more than they already do to help?

Thirty years or so years younger than Cherie, Rothna Shah, a very bright student from Leith, is in her third year of a Law degree course at Edinburgh University.  The secondary school she attended is in a poor district of the city and she says it was lucky to have 30 students in its sixth form of whom perhaps 10 went to university. Her father works hard to support his eight children, running a small business delivering Asian food and other materials. But she admits: “Although I have always wanted to be a lawyer, and my parents have always been ambitious for me, I doubt if I would have made it to this university without the  Pathways to the Profession scheme run by the university and sponsored by the Sutton Trust.”

She says: “Through Pathways I was able to attend various workshops and presentations which better informed me of what life as a lawyer would be like. I was also given links to mentors and tutors every time I needed advice and information. I have also been given some very useful lawyer contacts including an in-house lawyer.  Without all this help I don’t think I would have stayed the course.”

The Pathways scheme, so far unique to Scotland, has been running for a few years and targets students from non-professional families who will often be the first in their family to go to university, when they enter their sixth forms and encourages them to consider a legal or medical career. If they do they are given mentors, in the form of other further advanced law students, careers advice and introductions to law firms and Chambers. Over the last two years 176 Pathway students have entered the university and of these 103, including Rothna, are studying Law.  They still have formidable obstacles to overcome, not least how they are to support themselves while they do their training. Rothna says somehow or other she will find the money.

Last year the Sutton Trust, set up in 1997 to improve social mobility in the UK,  published research on the educational backgrounds of the UK’s top solicitors, barristers and judges. This found that three out of four top judges, more than two-thirds of top barristers and more than half the partners at leading law firms had attended private schools which educate just 7% of the population. Recently a Bar Council survey found that although there were more Bar students (38%) from ethnic minority backgrounds and 86% came from universities other than Oxbridge, a very large proportion (30%) are saddled with debts of over £20,000. A survey by The College of Law of 1865 of this year’s students, mainly on Legal Practice and Bar Vocational courses, found that 25% of them expected to have similar debts by the time they finished their course. As the Government has found with tuition fees, students from working class home are more averse, understandably, to running up large debts.  And as the Bar Council acknowledges, they have reason to be cautious, since there are not nearly enough pupillages to guarantee them work at the Bar.  

Coming from a not too privileged background myself and having left school at 16, I have always wanted to do something to help.  The College of Law is an excellent base for this, offering training for barristers and solicitors, and   being a charity, unlike some of its competitors, it is not concerned with shareholder values. With some 4,000 full-time students, we are the largest trainer of would-be solicitors and have to be a broad church in terms of admitting them. Furthermore we have oversubscribed week-end and evening courses for part-time solicitor students on five sites across the country and have for the last 10 years run a Law degree correspondence course with the Open University. In the forefront of e-learning we aim to extend ourselves more widely in the future.

But I have always known there was more we could do. In 2001 I attended a meeting with Cherie  Booth and Sir Peter Lampl, the entrepreneurial philanthropist who set up the Sutton Trust, to work out how we could attract more students from poor backgrounds to the Law.  The result was one of the first summer and winter schools to introduce students from inner London boroughs to a possible career in the Law via a winter school at the London School of Economics followed by a summer course at the College.

Then last year seeing the success of the Edinburgh scheme, which was singled out for a best practice award  by  Universities UK, the College decided to invest £1.25m over five years and to put its money where its heart is. This will enable the Pathways Scheme to be set up and to be targeting schools around each of our five centres – in London, Birmingham, Guildford, Chester and York - working with universities in those parts of the country which will be selected on the basis of their commitment to widening participation and the reputation of their law course.  

The scheme is aimed at future solicitors and will be managed by the Sutton Trust which is putting a further £250,000 into the project.  By 2010 we estimate that we could be admitting 750 Pathways students each year. Most of these will have come from schools with a large proportion of children on free school meals and which do not send many students to university. Assuming about 6,000 Law students continue each year to start training contracts as solicitors, this works out as a significant 12.5% of the total number enrolling each year with the Law Society.

We shall be asking leading law firms to help us in terms of meeting these students, providing mentors, offering them work experience and considering them for training contracts.  For those students wanting to become corporate or commercial lawyers, the financial obstacles are not so formidable. We are already working with a number of top firms (incuding Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance and Linklaters) on firm-specific LPCs.  The partnerships we have with these and other firms mean that all their postgraduate course fees are paid for.

When it comes to students keen to do Legal Aid work we have a similar scheme with the Legal Services Commission, which will provide some help with course fees. We still need to find some form of funding help for those students attracted to the universities through the Pathways scheme who wish to work for High Street and other small firms who cannot fund them through their courses.

The Pathways scheme will cover Bar students. But they could be lost to the Bar if the profession does not respond to them in the same was as solicitor firms are likely to do. We will need help from Barristers Chambers. We shall be asking them if they would consider providing mentors, offering Pathway students special pupillages and organising events, perhaps sponsored by the Inns, where they can meet barristers, benchers, judges and law lords. Perhaps the Inns could look favourably on them for scholarships and find sponsors of the kind they offer their own student members.

Ideally we would like to find a respected university, which would take would-be Bar students from non-priviliged backgrounds under its wing and become a centre for this. I would be interested in meeting a law faculty that might be interested in discussing this opportunity.

Indeed, both parts of the legal profession have welcomed the project: Stephen Hockman QC has said: “The Bar Council wants to ensure that entry to the Bar is diverse from all sections of society. We welcome this initiative which will support our own efforts to ensure that membership of the Bar is inclusive and open to all.” Fiona Woolf, President of the Law Society has said there is much more to do if the Legal Profession is to become “truly reflective of society”.

But if we are to succeed in this, we want more than blessings from on high on this enterprise, welcome though these are. The College is happy to talk and meet with anyone to see how this project, which will enrich the profession with diversity, can be furthered.