Plan to allow solicitors to qualify as barristers without pupillage opposed by Bar Council

Plans to reform barrister training could see solicitors and academics being exempted from doing a traditional pupillage, but the Bar Council has reacted with fury at the proposals.

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) has been looking at ways to modernise and expand the pathways into the barristers’ profession since 2015 with its future bar training project, which is now nearing completion. As Legal Futures reports, recent consultations on the training framework for the Bar include proposals to automatically ‘passport’ solicitors with rights of audience, as well as academics through the process of qualifying as barristers, exempting them from pupillage.

The Bar Council argues that the reforms would damage the barrister brand. It said that allowing a solicitor who has been granted rights of audience by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to qualify as a barrister without doing pupillage would “dilute the high standards rightly required of practising barristers; and it will provide an easy parallel route to the Bar for those practitioners who have failed the Bar’s entry and training requirements.”

This also amounted to a swipe at the SRA, which the Bar Council says has “markedly less strict training requirements”.

Responding to the BSB’s consultation, the Bar Council urged the regulator to change course. Whether the barristers’ body’s complaints will have an impact remains to be seen.