The College of Law acknowledges the concerns highlighted in the LPAB NSW survey and the recent comments made by the Chief Justice of New South Wales. We recognise the importance of maintaining confidence in practical legal education and remain firmly committed to ongoing improvement and transparency in our practises.
It is almost a quarter of a century since the last major review of the pre-admission training sector in the Australian legal profession. The time for a rethink, including its conceptual underpinnings, is overdue. The College has consistently supported and promoted this position to all sector stakeholders and authorities for many years now. Therefore, the LPAB survey provides support to a long-held College position and the organisation welcomes it.
A separate question about the way in which it might inform the objectives, content and methodology of any next stage of review. Leaving aside some technical concerns around the methodology, the survey questions seem to be probing knowledge and skills different in their detail from those prescribed in the APLEC/LACC Competencies and the Uniform National Admission Rules and we are yet to understand how they align. I know many stakeholders will be keen to look more closely at the document to understand its meaning in a more comprehensive way before committing to its findings one way or another.
In the meantime, the College encourages all stakeholders to consider the survey seriously and use it to support next stages of review including the national review process being led by the Admissions Committee of the Legal Services Council (LSC) and Law Admissions Consultative Committee (LACC).
The LPAB survey is an important piece of new evidence, but it needs to be considered as part of a more comprehensive review. The findings from the survey need to be weighed against other evidence such as detailed student evaluation data gathered at institutional level, especially when benchmarked to targets and comparative data, including comparative data drawn from Commonwealth sources, notably the QILT. The sector is co-regulated, after all, and the Commonwealth has an interest in this matter given the high levels of FEE-HELP student support involved in maintaining the PLT regime.
The College of Law is the largest provider in the PLT sector and accepts that it carries large-scale responsibility for the effectiveness of the sector as a whole. However, this responsibility needs to be comprehended in context of what the regulatory bodies have actually required it to do. Based on the existing national competencies, what the College does is basic, generalist training to prepare law graduates to commence work in supervised legal practice. Learning knowledge and skills which are specialist, or firm-specific in character, is the responsibility of the supervisor. As the College has long known, apparently reinforced by the survey results, supervision is by far the most problematic aspect of the current PLT prescription both for diligent students and busy practitioners alike.
All pre-license professional education across all professions tries to strike the right balance between structured curriculum and on-the-job learning. Whether that balance remains right for the profession of law or whether it should be adjusted in some way at this time should be an important area of enquiry for the impending national review and the College will support the outcomes of that review whatever they may be, bearing in mind the high importance of maintaining equitable access, given that a foundational purpose of establishing the College in the first place was to democratise.
Issues of Cost and Quality
As a provider of entry-level basic training, the College strives toward a single threshold standard of baseline competence in each of the 100 Competencies prescribed by the Rules and its own curriculum.
Yet the target group is necessarily plural in its arrival knowledge and learning expectations, and the workplaces to which they go are also highly diversified. Beyond baseline competence in prescribed generalist fields, graduates leave our courses with plural knowledge and skillsets as relevant to their career ambitions and levels of effort in that direction.
While the baseline standard is non-negotiable for every student, no one should be overly surprised that individual skill and knowledge sets are variable across the large sample, according to personal career preferences and personal contexts.
The College agrees it is time for a rethink of the prescribed Competencies which responds to the issues above as well as the outcomes of the LPAB survey. An important next area of enquiry following through on the survey should seek to understand with more particularity precisely what areas of knowledge and skill the profession sees as wanting in new graduates in order to inform a next statement of competencies which reflects that view. This is beyond the ambition of the current survey, which, as headlined, is mixed in its outcomes and findings. It would seem that some follow-up enquiries will be required.
These further enquiries may well inform prescriptions of competence in a way which attracts review of current tuition fee levels but, having regard to the cost of professional education across all professions worldwide, this seems to the College unlikely.
Neville Carter
CEO
14 April 2025
