Latest Expert Witness News

Training to drive up standards for would-be barristers

All students must now pass an aptitude test before vocational courses

If it’s already tough getting into the Bar, it’s about to become a great deal tougher. All aspiring barristers will soon have to take a special aptitude test before they can sit the one-year vocational training course, a move that could weed out hundreds of applicants a year.

The move comes after a report by a working party under Derek Wood, QC, to the Bar Standards Board (BSB), the body in charge of regulating the profession. It found a huge mismatch between the numbers of students enrolling for the Bar Vocational Course (BVC) and numbers of training places, or pupillage, in chambers.

It also found that the standards of the BVC programmes were not sufficiently rigorous and that many graduates were so “lacking in the qualities needed for successful practice at the Bar, including fluency in spoken and written English, that they would never obtain pupillage, however many pupillages were available”.

With the BVC now costing between £9,000 and £13,000, such wastage is of huge concern. Are students aware of the mismatch? Are they aware, too, that some emerge so poorly qualified that they will never land a pupillage?

The latest figures show that 1,730 students registered last year for full and part-time BVC studies. But even discounting the 23 per cent of overseas students, in any year about 3,200 graduates are jostling for 450 pupillages.

back