Many on BPTC "not up to it", says BSB chair
updated on 01 March 2011
In the wake of recent discussion over whether to implement aptitude tests for postgraduate law courses (see "SRA blocks Kaplan LPC admissions test", "Aptitude tests prove popular in profession" and "Bar Chair considers moral obligation to number of new barristers"), the chair of the Bar Standards Board (BSB) Baroness Deech has said that many who take the BPTC are "wasting their money" because they are "not up to it".
Deech is reported in the Law Gazette as saying: "There are too many people on the course who shouldn’t be there. We need to give a signal to those who aren’t up to it that they’re wasting their money."
Deech stressed that she spoke out in a bid to tackle the mismatch between the number of BPTC graduates and the number of pupillage vacancies, and to prevent large numbers of students from spending huge sums of money on the course when they have little hope of finding a job at the end of it. Last year, BSB figures revealed that around 1,400 students did the BPTC, while only 478 pupillages were available.
For further confirmation that there is support in the legal profession for aptitude testing, the University of Manchester has recently signed up to the National Admissions Test for Law (LNAT) - an aptitude test developed by a consortium of UK universities to assess candidates' potential for studying law at undergraduate level (see "LNAT Attracts Three More Universities"). Universities already using LNAT as part of their law admissions process include the Universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Durham, Nottingham and Oxford, King's College London and University College London.
