BSB to consult on 'professional statement' for barristers

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) hopes that a 'professional statement' could be the key to making qualification routes to the Bar more flexible and innovative, the regulator has announced.

As of this week, the regulator for barristers has launched an open consultation which suggests that creating the statement would outline the standards required of all barristers from when they are issued a full practising certificate. This in turn, the regulator says, will further inform educators and trainers in the design of qualification routes to the Bar.

Director of education and training for the BSB, Dr Simon Thornton-Wood, pictured, said: 'It will mean providers and trainers can focus more on instilling in students the knowledge and skills required to practise and thrive at the Bar, and less on ensuring the details of their course meet previously prescriptive regulations. Ultimately we hope that greater flexibility will lead to more affordability, too.'

Similar to the Solicitors Regulation Authority's (SRA) competence statement, the professional statement would define what a newly authorised barrister should be able to do from day one and would allow for more freedom in the ways in which the Bar course and pupillage are delivered.

Despite social mobility efforts in recent years, access to practise at the Bar is still perceived as elitist and restricted to Oxbridge.

Barrister James Robottom of 7 Bedford Row noted in Young Lawyer's Barrister Focus last autumn that although the Bar Council have introduced a 'fair recruitment rule', in 2013, some 44 per cent of the Bar attended a fee paying school, 'far higher than the percentage of children in the general population who attend such schools - and 65 per cent were male,' he said. The hefty £17,000 on average price tag for the Bar Professional Training Course also plays a part, he added.

The statement itself

The statement, which the Bar describes a central tenet of the regulator's Future Bar Training programme, would apply to all areas of practice and consist of four elements: technical legal characteristics, personal values and standards, management of practice, and ability to work with others.

The reforms are similar to those made by the SRA in that they are both responses to the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR), and that both organisations are driven by the same regulatory agenda.

In terms of what the new routes to qualification look like, the BSB has said it will be for the providers of education and training to decide, but the statement will be the desired outcome or end point.

The BSB has, however, already suggested that chambers and employers are best placed to decide how to plan and provide pupillages, and are also considering whether the BPTC has to be restricted to one integrated course. The regulator says it plans to issue another consultation on the BPTC and pupillage in early summer.

Laura Clenshaw is managing editor of Solicitors Journal and editor of Young Lawyer

@SJ_weekly | @YLawyer