Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School - College of Social ...

The Quest For a Core
the vocational year was designed to bridge the gap between the
academic stage and apprenticeship rather than to replace it. Given
the increasing difficulty of legal practice, the survival of apprenticeship
in an improved form was almost certainly a healthy outcome,
but it delayed the development of formal skills training in this country.
When the new courses were eventually introduced, they were
able to build on an extensive body of experience in the Commonwealth
and the United States, as well as in industry and other
occupations. 51
The modern skills movement, though diverse and controversial,
is guided by a recognisable orthodoxy. This might be summarised
as follows 52 : One of the main objectives of legal training is to
enable intending practitioners to achieve minimum standards of
competency in basic skills before being let loose on the public;
what constitutes such skills depends on a job analysis of what lawyers
of different kinds in fact do; lawyer-jobs can be analysed into
transactions or operations, which can be further broken down into
tasks or sub-operations; a skill or skill-cluster denotes the ability
to carry out a task to a specified standard. Minimum, acceptable
competence is to be distinguished from excellence. It is the main
function of primary legal education and training to ensure that all
entrants to the profession exhibit minimum competence in a range
of skills, measured by actual performances which satisfy articulated
criteria under specified conditions. Problem-solving is, in this view,
seen either as one of the most important basic skills or, as some
would have it, the master skill under which all lawyering tasks can
be subsumed. Finally, there is an ethical dimension: the standard
lists of skills include ability to recognise and to resolve ethical
dilemmas. 53 Issues of ethics, values and professional responsiblity
are linked to the learning of each skill—hence the idea of "a pervasive
approach" to professional responsibility. 54
Linking professional training to job-analysis makes obvious
sense. Some of the early efforts were open to the criticism that they
were too wedded to a crude form of bureaucratic rationalism that
emphasised observable behaviour and discrete, measurable outcomes,
while down-playing intuitive, holistic and more subtle
aspects of competence. 55 There has been a tendency to produce
longer and longer lists of skills without much analysis of the relations
between them nor any serious attempt to establish priorities.
A more discriminating use of occupational psychology and the
sociology of the professions is gradually beginning to underpin
these new developments.
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