Bar Council publishes shared parental leave guide for chambers

The Bar Council has published its new guide on barristers’ shared parental leave, in which it urges chambers to do more than the bare minimum required to support tenants who become parents or carers.

The Bar Standards Board, the barristers’ regulator, changed its rules to require all chambers to allow any member who becomes a carer of a child to take parental leave in November 2017, following much lobbying from the Bar Council. Chambers must now implement policies which enable this by 2018, although the precise details of such policies will be decided by each individual set.

However, the Bar Council is hoping that its new shared parental leave guide will set the standard of what chambers’ policies should look like, encouraging all sets to introduce high-quality parental leave policies that do more than just the minimum required. The guide also explains the benefits to chambers and the barristers’ profession of encouraging parents and parental leave at the Bar, and sets out how misuse of parental leave policies can be avoided.

You can read the guide for yourself here.