The Future Professional Self: Enabling a Community of Advocate Leaders: The Future Professional Self

With the advent of the new national Solicitors’ Qualification Examination and the launch of the Future Bar Training, universities now have more freedom to shape the design of their law programmes in a way that can nurture a students’ future professional self and ease their transition into the legal profession. This paper will draw on findings from research conducted during the academic year 2018-19 into the experiences of students undertaking a new Advocacy and Court Practice module as part of an LLB programme.
The research in question relates specifically to how universities can contribute to the teaching of the skill of advocacy in order to produce levels of confidence and competency amongst court advocates. Criminal advocacy in particular has come under increasing scrutiny with the 2014 Jeffrey Review concluding that there were grounds for concern about the quality of advocacy in UK courts. This has been compounded by the suspension of the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (an accreditation scheme for advocates) in 2018 following much opposition to the scheme by the Bar. The 2018 research by Birkbeck’s Institute for Criminal Policy Research found that whilst judges perceived most advocacy in their courts to be competent, many felt that the quality had declined over time and more advocacy assessment and continuing professional development was required. There remains a need for early and effective training in the skill of advocacy. Drawing on psychological and leadership theories, this paper examines how universities can incorporate postgraduate levels of competency into undergraduate professional pathways by drawing on lessons from an Advocacy and Court Practice module developed at Royal Holloway as part of its LLB programme offering.