A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

366 ❘
Teaching in the disciplines
Interrogating practice
How do you ensure that the knowledge and skills identified in the Benchmark
Statement are developed and demonstrated?
Resourcing the law school
Law regularly attracts a high number of applications to university, including large
numbers of overseas students, making it a profitable source of income for institutions.
However, despite this, law schools do not find themselves well resourced. Vicechancellors
have had a tendency to view law as a ‘cash cow’, underwriting less popular
and more resource-intensive discipline areas. Institutions persist in seeing law as
primarily text based, with teaching delivered using the traditional lecture and
tutorial/seminar format. Law schools have repeatedly argued that being regarded as a
‘cheap’ subject to resource has unfairly disadvanted the creative development of law
teaching (see e.g. Directions in Legal Education, 2004). But they have also been complicit
in the perpetuation of the status quo by failing consistently to articulate an alternative
vision. Nevertheless, at a discipline level, innovations do exist, with significant
developments in e-learning and clinical legal education among the successes. Both of
these, however, may need additional specialist skills or resources to establish effectively.
The examples given below show how learning can be taken beyond the confines of the
lecture and tutorial within a more conventional skills/resource envelope. This is not to
doubt that law schools need to push for a higher unit of resource. To be successful,
however, they need evidence that practices are changing and that there is a clear
pedagogical case for more diverse learning environments.
Widening access
There are serious questions to be addressed by both law schools and vocational training
providers about fair access to legal study. Linked to the government’s drive to widen
participation in higher education, the pressure on law schools as a whole to admit more
students from more diverse backgrounds is intense, if differentially applied. There is no
doubt that, overall, it is law schools in the post-92 institutions that have admitted higher
student numbers in recent years. The pre-92 institutions that are able to select rather than
recruit their students have had the scope to find other mechanisms for identifying those
best suited to legal study. An example is the establishment of the Law National
Admissions Test as a supplement to A Level results, which is now used as part of the
admissions process by ten pre-92 university law schools. Even so, increasing student
numbers and the need to adapt to the learning needs of a more diverse student body are