Kevin Kerrigan from Northumbria University and myself ran an afternoon session at the UKCLE event in Edinburgh on Developing the Undergraduate Law Student Experience (see blog post: Enhancing Legal Education in Scotland Event for the morning session). Kevin spoke about how Northumbria, Westminster and others have sought to combine their undergrad substantive law programmes with the one year vocational skills course and the two year practise-based traineeship. Bringing aspects together from each of the previously separate entities there can be a more logical progression from, for example, criminal law to procedure to advocacy; or land law to conveyancing. Students are still afforded the opportunity to exit with a traditional liberal-arts style LLB and must do so unless they secure the traineeship-syle placements necessary for the remainder of the 5 year programme at a particular stage.
This reminded me of the problem-based learning approach adopted by York University (see previous blog post: What McMaster did for medical training, can York do for legal education?) last year, and of course, the recent development of the clinical LLB at Strathclyde more recently discussed in the post below.
My own presentation looked at some of the
less radical means of enhancing the undergraduate experience that may not
require a complete refocus of the programme, or financial / time consuming
clinics – both of which can be highly commended, but require enormous effort.
I illustrated my talk with three examples: work-related learning, which includes clinics, simulations, and problem-based learning. Some of which may be time or resource intensive, but on occasion can be a short 2 day simulation package. Secondly, the internationalisation of staff, students and the programme; and thirdly, examples of tools and technologies that universities should perhaps be adopting to equip our students with skills for the 21st century.
The slides from this, and from other
presenters on the day, will most likely appear on the UKCLE website’s Scotland Pages in due course, but for now - mine is below.
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