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

Law in the Universities: The Historical Context
62 Available statistics are spotty and do not always clearly differentiate between the
United Kingdom, Great Britain and England and Wales. The best collation to
date is to be found in Richard Abel, The Legal Profession in England and Wales
(1988). The third Wilson report op. cit. gives detailed figures for 1980-81 and
1990-91 for "old" universities; the ALT study, which is continuing, deals with
the former polytechnics and colleges of further education, but omits some categories.
In most public policy and statistical documents law is lumped together
anonymously under the social sciences and is to a remarkable extent invisible.
63 Harris and Bellerby, op. cit, and Wilson, op. cit, emphasise the difficulty of
constructing meaningful figures on SSRs, but there is no doubt that there has
been a significant deterioration.
64 See below Chap. 3.
65 Above n. 21.
66 Writing of the former polytechnics and non-university sectors, Harris and Bellerby
reported in 1993: "Since 1981 there has been a 50 per cent, growth in law degree
students and a five-fold increase in numbers on mixed/joint degrees. Part-time
expansion has significantly outstripped growth in full-time provision. Growth in
student numbers has not been matched by similar rates of growth in teaching
staff." op. cit. at p. viii.
67 See W. Twining, "Postgraduate Legal Studies" in P. Birks (ed), Reviewing Legal
Education (forthcoming). The term "postgraduate studies", which used to refer
exclusively to advanced academic programmes, is gradually being extended to
include primary practical training courses (such as the Legal Practice Course),
some of which may lead eventually to a Master's degree.
66 Harris and Bellerby, op. cit., Chap. 4. Much of this takes place in Colleges of
Further Education and other non-university institutions.
69 Derek Bok, The Cost of Talent (1993) Chap. 8.
70 Above n. 47.
71 For a vivid account of the problems, see Philip Thomas, "The Poverty of Students"
(1993) 27 The Law Teacher 152.
72 Heads of University Law Schools, Law as an academic discipline (1983) The bulk
of the report was published in the S.P.T.L. Newsletter, Summer, (1984); see also
the submissions by the Law Society to the U.F.C. and P.F.C. in 1991 (0228R and
0234R), quoted by Philip Thomas, op. cit, at p. 154.
73 From 1993 the unit of resource of fees-only social science students was reduced
by approximately 30 per cent. (£1300 compared to £2,770 for laboratory and
workshop-based courses) in order to deter expansion of social science departments,
including law (Thomas, ibid.)
48