One of the SRA’s stated aims in shaking up legal education was to improve diversity in the solicitors’ profession. The logic was that, by removing the need to take and pass the LPC before a getting a training contract and qualifying as a solicitor, students would not have to take the “LPC gamble” of spending around £15,000 on the LPC without knowing they had a job at the end of it (excluding those lucky few who were granted a training contract while on the LLB or GDL of course).
The SQE will open up a more diverse selection of routes into the profession. As long as you meet the SRA’s four requirements – a degree, passing the SQE, completing two years of qualifying work experience, and satisfying the character and suitability requirements – you can become a solicitor.
In our previous blogs on the SQE, we discussed the range of preparatory courses that are going to emerge for the SQE and also concluded that the SQE will not kill off the traditional training contract. There will be a real demand from students to learn a serious amount of law. And law firms are going to stick with what they know works. So courses that look very much like the GDL and LPC are going to continue – along with a wide range of online and crammer courses popping up too.
Sadly, this market reality is going to really affect the SQE’s aim of diversification.
The two tests, SQE1 and SQE2, can be sat without any preparatory course being taken. The SQE test alone could cost from £3,000 to £4,500, according to the SRA. That is a huge cost simply to sit a test. And it will be a hard test – taking it without any preparation would be to gamble away the cost of sitting it.
Currently know how much preparatory courses will cost. There will potentially be a huge range – in both cost and quality – of such courses. But if we look at the courses offered by BPP and ULaw, it seems like they will cost a similar amount to the current GDL and LPC courses, perhaps £8,000 to £16,000.
So, at a similar cost, it looks like the “LPC gamble” is simply being replaced by an “SQE gamble”. The worst part is that those students from less-advantaged sections of society will have less money, less experience and less time at their disposal, so they will be the ones most adversely affected by the gamble of whether to go straight for the SQE test without paying for a preparatory course or whether to have a better chance by paying for a preparatory course but still not have a guaranteed pass or career at the end of it. Those students who can afford to will still be free to decide whether to gamble on whether to pay for a best-in-class preparatory course.
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