Ethics training on the BPTC does not prepare barristers for practice and must be reformed, says lecturer

The ethical considerations of being a barrister are not being taught to Bar students because so much learning time is devoted to preparing for the “massive memory test” that is their exams, according to a senior lecturer and former barrister.

Speaking at a Future Bar Training event, Northumbria University lecturer and former barrister William Ralston said that future training reforms must make “time and space” for students to understand the ethical principles which underpin the profession. As Legal Futures reports, Ralston said that the current system’s focus on testing rote learning has “crowded out” ethics. He argued that money laundering issues should be much more prevalent in ethics training, as “money laundering is something you can come across quite quickly in practice and in very innocuous circumstances”. Ralston also criticised the short-answer questions and closed-book conditions which currently form the ethics segment of Bar Professional Training Course assessments.

Ralston said: “I’m afraid that what is going on at Bar schools today is that the students are so concerned about anxiously concentrating on recollecting the letters of the code and guidance that they are not concentrating on the spirit of it. I do not see the need to deny students access to the codes and guidance in an assessment. If the students do not know the codes and guidance relatively closely in a closed book examination, they will fail it, but I think we should get students used to the idea of referring to the documents actively when they need to in practice. They shouldn’t be simply learning to pass the exam and clutching for something from the reaches of their memory when an ethical issue arises.”