Can BVC providers seriously damage your health?

The latest update in the prolonged and somewhat agonised debate over access to the Bar looks more likely to reignite discussion than resolve the matter.

That update comes in the form of BSB proposals, issued on Friday (18 July), which revolve around refashioning the Bar Vocational Course (BVC) into the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) and centrally raising standards.

This is not immediately compelling, partly because it is not apparent what needs changing from the original BVC content, let alone why there is a need for a new, even more unwieldy, name. Unlike the debate about solicitors’ training, the key issue with qualification to the Bar in recent years has focused on access and fairness rather than a consideration of whether barrister training is fit for the modern age.

In comparison, the proposal to cut BVC numbers to account for the difficulty of gaining pupillage via the imposition of a new aptitude test at least has more obvious merits.

But while it is hard to see how these recommendations can go a long way to solving the intractable problems of access at the Bar – loads of people want to do it but the advocacy profession can only support very limited numbers – what is striking is how much distrust of BVC providers underpins this debate.

Many of the strongest criticisms regarding access are reserved for providers that, many argue, charge high fees to some students who have no chance of gaining pupillage.

This is underlined by the comments of Derek Wood QC, who chaired the BSB working party, that “there are students who simply would not meet the standards required to obtain pupillage, however many pupillages were on offer”. For this he cites a “lack of conceptual understanding of the way in which law functions, [an] inability to speak fluently and an inability to write well-structured English prose”.

If Woods’ comments are representative, it seems that the real underlying problem is one of informing aspiring barristers of the brutal realities they face and the credibility of BVC providers in general.

As Lord Neuberger hinted at last year in a report on access for the Bar Council, perhaps what we are moving towards is a version of a cigarette-packet warning with which providers have to give strident declarations of the risks of smoking - sorry, Bar training.

While not much of an endorsement of education providers, this would seem to be a more logical response to the problem. After all, somehow centrally imposing higher standards on Bar training is in direct conflict with the market-based system that supplies legal education in the UK.

Imposing higher standards also limits places by other means, but there are many desirable careers in which many attempt and fail to enter without educational quotas being imposed. Instead, forcing ever more graphic disclosure of the risks to your career of BVC training would at least mean that those that choose to take the risks do so from a position of informed consent. Ultimately, tt should also mean that BVC providers would be encouraged to take more heed of the damage the BVC debate is doing to their collective brand.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com

New aptitude test proposed in rebranded BVC