Solicitor apprenticeships on trial: can they survive level 7 cash cull?

Long read

As the government rethinking funding for level 7 apprenticeships, Jessica Hill cross-examines the promise of solicitor apprenticeships: are they truly a gamechanger for under-represented talent, or a cheaper path for the privileged?

The goal was described as “simple yet ground-breaking”… to “revolutionise the legal landscape by empowering students from diverse backgrounds to pursue a career they may have never thought possible”.

So said City Century, a collaboration of 50 City law firms launched last year to promote the level 7 solicitor apprenticeships that were rapidly gaining traction in the legal sector.

There were also plans to introduce barrister apprenticeships next year, breaking down barriers to the country’s most elitist profession.

Then-skills minister Robert Halfon welcomed the City Century collaboration for “extending the ladder of opportunity” by “giving more people from all backgrounds the chance to enter this prestigious career without a student debt”.

But the new government has a different view of Master’s-equivalent level 7 apprenticeships.

It is moving some of them – it hasn’t yet decided which – outside the scope of levy funding, putting the future of solicitor apprenticeships under threat.

Jonathan Bourne, managing director of Damar Training, claims defunding its solicitor apprenticeship programmes would mean centuries-old barriers that are “just beginning to come down will be reinforced”.

But have these programmes really extended a ladder of opportunity? Or have they simply enabled those from privileged backgrounds a new entry point into lucrative careers without the burden of up to £60,000 of student debt?

Apprenticeships experts Jonathan Bourne of Damar Training and Victoria Cromwell of BARBRI Global

Programme lowdown

The level 7 solicitor apprenticeship takes at least six years to complete and provides funding of up to £27,000. For those with degrees already, graduate solicitor apprenticeships can be completed in half that time.

The apprenticeship, launched in 2016, was an attempt to build better vocational routes into the legal profession.

The full programme, aimed at school and college leavers, paralegals and chartered legal executives, covers a law degree with hands-on experience. To qualify, apprentices must take the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE), the second part of which is the end-point assessment.

The programme is currently the fourth most popular level 7 apprenticeship, with 2,090 learners starting in the last two years.

Bourne is expecting “continued strong growth” in 2024-25, while another provider, Datalaw, says it has registered over 1,000 expressions of interest to join its 2024/25 cohort in the past six months.

FE Week found at least 64 law firms offering or planning to offer solicitor apprenticeships, with the programme also provided to those within the in-house legal departments of private companies, central and local government and the Crown Prosecution Service.

By 2040, City Century envisaged that at least 100 new partners would have been created via the solicitor-apprentice route.

Legal ladders

The upper echelons of the legal profession are notoriously difficult to break into. Around 24,000 law and graduate diploma law students graduate each year, but fewer than 6,000 make it onto the solicitor training contract – the traditional route into the profession.

Bourne says for those who are not “economically or academically extremely fortunate”, it is “a big bet to take with £60,000 of borrowed money”.

“Many people who aspire to become solicitors end up doing other things or getting stuck in paralegal roles,” he says.

But solicitor apprenticeships are even more competitive to get onto than the traditional route, given there are no hefty student loans to repay and apprentices earn whilst qualifying.

The average median hourly pay for an 18-year-old apprentice last year was £7.72 (roughly £16,057 a year), but a college leaver at law firm White & Case can earn £32,000, rising to over £60,000 as an apprentice solicitor.

Five other law firms offer at least £28,000 a year to apprentices.

Legal recruitment consultant Sue Lenkowski says many firms take on around two apprentices, but “may be attracting 1,500-plus applicants”.

Jagtara Singh Taak, 20, was rejected by four of his five university choices for a law degree, then turned down for a solicitor apprenticeship, despite getting two A*s and three As at A Level. After joining law firm Loch Law as an admin assistant, the firm noted his potential and put him on the apprenticeship path.

But while some law firms are inundated with applicants, parts of the system are creaking with workforce shortages.

Last year The Law Society warned of a 26 per cent fall in the number of duty solicitors available to advise people who have been arrested, where they aren’t able to pay for their own defence lawyer.

Law Society president Lubna Shuja warned “our crumbling courts are overwhelmed, prisons overcrowded, and judges and lawyers overstretched. With fewer duty solicitors and more cases coming into the system, we have reached breaking point.”

Solicitor apprentice Jagtara Singh Taak

Diversity doubts

Solicitors still overwhelmingly come from privileged backgrounds; last year 21 per cent of lawyers at firms regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority had attended a fee-paying school.

And it doesn’t yet appear apprenticeships have made a dent in widening access. The proportion of lawyers from low socio-economic backgrounds reduced from 21 per cent in 2015 to 18 per cent in 2023, an SRA survey found.

However, Lynette Smith, learning and development partner at law firm Brabners, believes the diversity-boosting impact of the apprenticeships just takes time to show up in the figures.

“To turn the ship around takes a while to get people on board in terms of the new way of doing things,” she says.

Her firm only started a new apprenticeships programme in January 2023, to “support those from underprivileged backgrounds”.

She adds: “We wanted to ensure that those apprenticeships were not just an opportunity for those wanting to progress, but an opportunity for those who couldn’t progress through the traditional means”.

Bourne says a “significant proportion” of Damar’s solicitor apprentices are from “non-traditional” backgrounds, while Datalaw says 42 per cent of its cohort are from minority groups and 34 per cent from local authority areas with high deprivation.

Phil Hodgson of Citizens Advice Gateshead Society Matters Group

In-house benefits

It’s not just those in law firms benefitting from solicitor apprenticeships. Around 29 per cent of the employers signed up to Damar’s apprenticeship programme are in-house legal teams. They include 21 councils, a part of the legal sector that Bourne says has “traditionally found it hard to recruit, develop and retain legal talent”.

Fiona Anthony set up a solicitor apprenticeship programme while at NP Law (owned by Norfolk Council), enabling its paralegals to qualify as solicitors. She says it was “transformative”, adding: “The likelihood is that [without it], our paralegals would have left for training contracts elsewhere.”

Victoria Cromwell, head of new business and account management for legal education provider BARBRI Global, says there is a “real shift” for in-house legal teams to “grow junior talent”, given “constraints on budget and headcount”.

About 30 per cent of BARBRI’s business is now from “corporates” rather than law firms, which is “significantly higher than two years ago”.

Cromwell says: “Whereas previously the apprenticeship levy was heavily used in the engineering division of a company for instance, we’re now seeing the legal teams taking a piece.”

Of Datalaw’s solicitor apprentices, 43 per cent work in legal aid-funded law firms covering crime, family, or children’s law, representing vulnerable people, and the same proportion work for other small organisations.

Solicitor apprentice Phil Hodgson says his employer, Citizens Advice Gateshead, is a charity which “could not otherwise afford this training”.

Flex Legal, an online platform that aims to boost diversity in the legal profession, will by November have placed 100 trainees from lower socioeconomic backgrounds into solicitor apprenticeships in the last three years. It recently worked with Tesco to set up an assessment process to pick three “aspiring lawyers” from “the shop floor”, says company founder Mary Bonsor. Two are now solicitor apprentices.

Jamie Holden, who works in the legal department for optician chain Specsavers, had no post-GCSE qualifications and worked in a nightclub and in a bookies, before “falling into” work as an IT specialist. It was only after his Specsavers boss tasked him with leading a commercial project with its legal team that he showed an interest in law, which led to his apprenticeship.

He says he “never imagined” he would be doing an apprenticeship at age 47. Next year he will take his first “big exams”, while his daughter takes her GCSEs.

“My friends laugh at me because I’ve got a student card – I get 10 per cent off at Superdrug. Most of them think apprenticeships are just for brickies.”

As Specsavers’ first solicitor apprentice, he and the company are on a steep learning curve. But he feels “old and ugly enough to roll with it”.

Tough but flexible

Solicitor apprentice Madison Earl

Holden describes his apprenticeship as “possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever done”.

That’s reflected in the 2022-23 achievement rate for solicitor apprenticeships which was 46.2 per cent, compared to 57.6 per cent for all legal programmes and 54.3 per cent for all apprenticeships.

But Bourne points out the first cohort “battled through a long, fledgling and very challenging programme, and navigated Covid”.

Lucy Andrews, who started her solicitor apprenticeship with WBW Solicitors after finishing her law degree, says the “intensive” course is “a big commitment and can be stressful”.

But she also says the flexibility of the programme is “really advantageous”, and allowed her to change her weekly study day if needed.

Madison Earl says her solicitor apprenticeship with Sills & Betteridge LLP has enabled her to “balance work, study, and family life”.  

“As a young working mother, I never imagined a career in law was possible,” she says. “It’s opened doors I thought were permanently closed to me.”

Reforms ‘bad for opportunity’

Bourne is proud that almost three quarters (71 per cent) of Damar’s solicitor apprentices are 25 and over because they include many paralegals who previously had no accessible progression route to qualification. But it is their age that may count against future cohorts, as the new government wants to see more funding poured into training young people.

Charles Peter founder of Datalaw

Labour’s manifesto pledged a “youth guarantee” of training, an apprenticeship, or support to find work for all 18 to 21 year olds, and with the current apprenticeship budget at breaking point it cannot afford to keep funding level 7 programmes which are often undertaken by older, already highly qualified people.

But Datalaw’s founder Charles Peter argues that solicitor apprenticeships provide “essential skills for day-one solicitors, not seasoned managers”.

The future of the level 7 barrister apprenticeship, which had been expected to go live this year, is also now under threat.

Given that 56 per cent of King’s Counsel senior lawyers attended private schools it was hoped that the legal profession, “historically shrouded in tradition and rigidity”, was “on the brink of a monumental shift”, said Lawyer Portal, a platform for those breaking into the sector.

But if the cuts to funding level seven programmes do include these legal apprenticeships, surely law firms will dip into their own pockets for training instead?

After all, legal services is one of the UK’s most successful sectors, with its market turnover expected to pass £60 billion by 2027, a report by IRN Legal found.

Those currently offering apprenticeships include three of the world’s 10 biggest law firms; DLA Piper, Dentons and White & Case all had global revenues last year exceeding $2.9 billion.

Smith says she would “bravely like to think” that Brabners will “stay true to our values as a firm, and support [apprenticeships] regardless. But at the end of the day, it’s a business that we’re running.”

Bourne is not convinced that law firms would step up.

He points out the minimum one day a week off-the-job training already represents a significant investment for them. “I fear that we’d see retrenchment back to a small group of employers. Apart from a few targeted social mobility programmes run by those with the deepest pockets, most successful candidates would need to have some level of advantage.”

And the top rung of Halfon’s “ladder of opportunity’ would, Bourne warns, be removed. “It will be bad for growth, bad for opportunity and bad for employers,” he adds.

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