Caroline Gibby first, on ‘SQEixt: where do we go from here? The careful roar from the North’. Caroline asked what’s good, what’s bad about the SQE. There is a lot of confusion about SQE 1. There’s inconsistency regarding the Bar’s approach to it. Management often doesn’t understand the issues that are often quite complex; and (echoing Margaret Thornton) participation in a SQE-ready degree is taken for the the wrong reasons – often profit-driven. On their side, the SRA have not been listening to the learned institutions. Whole areas of law are erased, eg family law, which students are interested in. SQE costs are not fixed and will change (I’d say almost certainly increase). SQE reduced academic autonomy, impacts on research time and quality. We have REF, TEF, NSS and many other forms of audit. In spite of all this, many universities still expect law schools to take account of the SQE assessment. Caroline argues that we need to recapture the initiative: the law degree is more than a professional qualification. We need to give students the opportunity to become curious, critical, open to new knowledge. We should not allow ourselves to be defined by the SQE.
Next, Maribel Canto-Lopez on ‘What are law schools for? For a further 20 years of ignoring the voice of law teachers’. She started by asking what are law teachers for? Many are feeling that TEF is about consumerism in legal education, even though the main objective of TEF was to ‘provide clear information to students about where the best provision can be found’, and to ‘drive up the standards of teaching in all universities’. But a project report for UCU (Feb 2019) found that the TEF was unpopular with staff, and there were significant concerns regarding TEF as an instrument to measure teaching excellence. Recommendations included more teaching time for TEF. She also drew upon SQE. She characterised it as a dismantling of the existing system which according to the SRA will assist in social mobility and avoid inconsistencies in training. Maribel criticised the SQE heavily (rightly in my view, and the view of virtually everyone at the conference, I’d guess). There is resistance from law schools and sectors of the profession to the demolition of professional legal educational structures.
One of the biggest problems is the rise of performance management to boost incomes in universities. This results in stress, no work/life balance, no control. The situation is getting worse because of casualisation of the work contract for lecturers. To counteract this, we need staff satisfaction rated as a competitive advantage for HE, more engagement for staff. The dialogic and adaptational qualities that are described in chapter 3 of Birks’ collection are still required.