LPC provider follows arch rival to win university status
It has been a long time coming, but in August BPP finally succeeded in its long quest to secure full university status, furthering the ambitions of the UK’s top law schools.
The decision by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) to award the university title to BPP – which provides undergraduate and graduate business degrees across law, finance and tax and is the sole provider of the legal practice course (LPC) to many of the top City firms – will elevate its standing globally, dean and chief executive Peter Crisp told Legal Business. ‘Firstly, it’s the recognition, the reputation and the standing it gives us worldwide,’ said Crisp. ‘So obviously in terms of our appeal to students both in this country and internationally. It puts us on a par with other universities who also recruit on to the LLB and the vocational legal training practice.
‘It also reflects the confidence the government and the Privy Council have in the soundness of our teaching – that is our management and governance, etc – which is down to quality,’ Crisp added.
BPP is the exclusive LPC provider to 30 firms, including Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Slaughter and May, Hogan Lovells, Herbert Smith Freehills, Jones Day, Macfarlanes, Travers Smith and RPC.
It becomes the first for-profit provider to successfully undertake a full Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) review and satisfy all requirements, and Crisp points to the ‘rigorous review’ the school undertook with the QAA. With the help of Eversheds, it produced evidence about its governance structure, while PwC produced further evidence on the institution’s financials before a final decision was made by the government.
Eversheds partner Glynne Stanfield said: ‘It is very pleasing to see that a client we’ve advised for many years has now evolved into a fully-fledged university; it is well deserved.’ BPP’s rival, the University of Law, formerly the College of Law, was granted university status last November.
This latest development comes as providers and professional bodies alike continue to face challenges over how to renew and modernise vocational education as the shape of the legal profession changes, set against a backdrop of falling numbers of training contracts.
Professor Carl Lygo, chief executive of parent company BPP Holdings, said that the school’s graduates were ‘exceptionally employable, with some 96% employed or in further study’ within six months of leaving the school. Earlier this year BPP took the unusual step of promising free alternative training to its LPC graduates who do not obtain a job in law within six months.
The award of university status underlines the continuing and often controversial influence of the UK’s elite vocational law schools, which have in recent years often been criticised for churning out graduates with little chance of professional careers in law.
June saw the publication of the long-awaited Legal Education and Training Review, which assessed the role of LPC providers as part of a root and branch investigation of the current state of lawyer education. However, the group’s final report stopped well short of radical recommendations that could have weakened the position of providers like BPP.