Student outreach work – why bother?
I have got a few things I want to catch up on – and you’ll be pleased to know it is not another Heated Rivalry post. It feels like I spent most of January asleep and most of February trying to wake up and catch up. I have not caught up, of course I haven’t. If I could actually catch up, that would suggest I don’t have a full time job… anyway. In the middle of my flu sickness absence, just as the coughing and snot production switched into crippling fatigue and stomach issues, I had a couple of days of almost coherence. Those two days coincided with the HELOA Conference I had agreed to go speak at with my absolutely brilliant colleague Jack Cooper. Here’s the blurb from the conference programme:
1.6: Working with academic colleagues to deliver effective outreach – Ballroom
Jack Cooper | Schools and Colleges Engagement Officer | Leeds Trinity University
Dr Jess Guth | Head of School of Business and Law | Leeds Trinity University
Engaging subject-level outreach is crucial to building meaningful relationships with schools and colleges and helping to breakdown barriers for students to access Higher Education. In this workshop, Jack Cooper, Schools and Colleges Engagement Officer and Dr Jess Guth, Head of School of Law from Leeds Trinity University will talk through their collaborative approach to designing and delivering high-impact subject outreach.
Honestly, I don’t really remember giving the talk that much. I remember struggling to breathe and being tired and struggling to hold onto thoughts. I also remember Jack being a really good presenter and setting the scene really well. In essence the argument was that Universities doing outreach work with Schools and Colleges is important for a variety of reasons – social justice, raising aspiration and widening access and participations and of course recruitment. I think I was the only academic in a room full of professional services staff. I think often running outreach sessions, travelling to schools and colleges or welcoming them to campus feels like another thing dumped on academics, another thing to do that doesn’t feel like it is really our job, something to be got out of. I have certainly worked with academics with attitudes like that over the course of my career. We argued that the relationships between the professional services team and academic staff is key to doing good, meaningful and effective outreach. We encouraged participants of the workshop to think about what they do, why, if it works, how it could be better and what maybe just needs to be stopped. It seemed to go well. It is also the only conference ever where, as a speaker, I received a thank you card.
Since the conference I have had cause to think more about outreach work for several reasons. One is that we are in the craziness of the student number planning cycle, workload planning and thinking about how many students we will have and when, where and how to teach them. Another is that I have recently received the outreach impact report from Jack’s team. As I have been working through spreadsheets my mind has been wandering off thinking about 2 different things in relation to outreach work: The first is a question about why I have never seen it as an add on. Even as a baby academic, I loved doing outreach sessions, I genuinely enjoyed going into Schools and Colleges, chatting to potential students, learning from their teachers. And I still do. But why? The second is about why we do this work and how we know if it works.
So first, why do I like this work? I think it is because I have never seen it as a recruitment activity as such. Of course that is usually how it is positioned for a university like mine. We need to be visible to the 17/18 year olds in our region. We need them to choose us. We are not a selective institution, we have to actively recruit. I understand that the outreach work is basically that. But to me it has always been the other stuff that matters more. I am a teacher at heart and outreach work is teaching. I have stood in so many classrooms in Keighley, Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham and surrounding areas and seen how the stories I can tell about my journey into Law or my friends’ journeys to university and beyond changes the perception of what is possible.
I taught a Law class at a local 6th Form in Keighley about a decade ago and was confronted by an angry young woman. She said ‘Why are you here? People like us don’t go to university. Go tick your boxes somewhere else’. I didn’t know what to say to her. I let her get in my face, I let her storm out. I said nothing when she came back in. I could have told her that I did my A-Levels in Keighley and I went to uni. Many of my friends grew up in some of the most deprived areas of Keighley, an already pretty poor town, and went to uni. I have told that story so many times and it always helps shift perspective. But somehow confronted with that anger, it didn’t seem right. It felt like I, we, had somehow got out and left a generation behind. We hadn’t made it better for those who came after us. It seems that the older I get, the more the ‘I sat where you are sitting now and look at me know’ narrative just feels smug and patronising. As I finished my session, I asked whether I could go sit with the angry young woman for a bit and ask her some questions. Of course her initial response was ‘Why do you care’. But she didn’t leave. In the end we talked for about 20 minutes. She wanted to be a lawyer but was already being told she needed to get that nonsense out of her head and go get a job. Finishing School was a luxury, going to university was outrageous. There was no money to support her, there was no understanding about what a university was, how it worked or what might be possible. I tried to explain, as best I could because I realised that explaining universities is hard – they’re weird! I can’t say that she was friendly but she was curious, she asked lots of questions. Then I left. I didn’t hear from her again. I don’t know what she is doing now but I do know that she went to a very prestigious university to study Law – her teacher told us. I think about her often. I hope that whatever she took from our conversation, she used it to help her get to where she wanted to be. She changed how I think about outreach work. It’s my opportunity to understand where today’s kids, tomorrow’s students, are in terms of their journeys, their understanding of what the future holds, their views on the world and their expectations of what comes next. She taught me to never assume anything and be prepared to abandon prepared sessions and activities and to focus on connection. Conversation is more important than content. Creating a space where the basics of degrees, universities, legal institutions and careers can be talked about without feeling embarrassed at not knowing and showing up in a way that makes clear that there are people out there, strangers at this point, who believe in them and are willing to take a chance on them are the most important things. I’m not there to persuade them to enrol with whatever university I happen to be working for – although I love seeing familiar faces arrive for welcome week – I am there to help them realise that the power to change their world is right there for them to grasp and if they let us in just a little bit, we will be right there with them.
Outreach work helps me design better transitions from College to Uni, it helps me create better teaching materials and use better examples, it helps me meet my students where they are and it makes me a better teacher. It also reminds me of my own privilege and the distance that can create and it reminds me that making the world a better place is our job and that while if often feels that way, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Even if it is just the one student encounter described above (and I think there are more), I am honoured to have been part of a little nudge that propelled her to jump into, what was for her and her family, a terrifying unknown, but one that had the potential to change her life. I hope it did.
I think in answering the first question, I have also answered the why we do it question. I guess I can’t speak for others but in summary, I do it because it changes the world for the better. Does it work? I don’t know. I know from the impact data that we have, that our outreach work generates applications for our courses. So for those who do it purely from a recruitment point of view – it seems to work. Does it change the world? Does it shift perspectives on what is possible? It often feels like it but actually I will never really know what impact I have. I like to think that sometimes I make a difference, that I am part of the spark that puts into focus that nothing is impossible and that whoever you thought you were, you deserve to go after your dreams. I don’t need data to tell me that I am helping to raise aspirations, creating the possibility to imagine a what if. And to be clear, I don’t care whether that what if is about becoming the next hot shot lawyer or rocket scientist or about living off grid and being self-sufficient or about finding your person and raising a huge family – or all of those things at different points in time. The power lies in the confidence to define your own what ifs. I know the power of being given the confidence and freedom to figure out my what if. I grew up in an environment where there was no real pressure to do well and no pressure at all to do anything specific, just lots of support for figuring out my dream and then living it. If I can be a tiny little bit of that for one or two kids I am lucky enough to cross paths with in those Schools and Colleges, then yeah, outreach work works.
The one where city firms are good at diversity and the SQE is a good thing
‘A parallel universe is a hypothetical self-contained reality co-existing with one’s own’ – says Wikipedia. Well today I found myself in one. The escalator from the ground floor to the basement of Kings Place in London is a portal between universes. That really is the only explanation for what happened today – at least the only one that makes any real sense.
I was at the Legal Cheek event: The Future of Legal Education and Training Conference. I was already irritated by the 8.30am start and the fact that all the breaks were termed ‘networking breaks’. I can’t get to London for an 8.30 networking breakfast. I got there and sat down just in time for the intro from Alex from Legal Cheek who really just plugged their exclusive survey saying that students are skeptical of the SQE and want more law tech included in their programmes. Well, from the brief bits he presented I doubt it’s that simple. Who exactly was asked what exactly and did they really understand what they were being asked? Some of the answers reported suggest that perhaps they did not. In fact a lot of what was said today suggests that the people who really ought to understand it (like the people invited to talk about it) don’t understand it. I could go through presentation by presentation and summarise it all for you but I value my mental health and my heart rate profile for today is quite erratic enough so let’s do this thematically. Here are the things that jumped out at me
- There were important voices missing. What we saw and heard today was a particular vision of law and lawyering which is not the law or the legal services that most of us (and certainly not most of the general public) engage in or come in contact with. It is rich mans law, it’s corporate, commercial and fundamentally about making already filthy rich clients more money. It is not about justice, it’s not about people, not about the social or the political, not about making the world a better place, not about harnessing the power (symbolic or otherwise) of law and lawyers to solve the big problems of the world. It was everything that makes people hate lawyers. I think it is what caused that flicker of disappointment in my mum’s face when I told her I wanted to study law and become a solicitor. It’s everything so many students think they should want even when they don’t.
- The SQE or at least the impact it is already having on universities and will certainly have on legal education is really poorly understood. Let me be clear. The SQE is an exam. It is not a programme, course or anything of that nature. It’s an exam. It therefore cannot deliver, in its own right, things like greater innovation, incorporation of tech, greater variety, cognitive diversity, any sort of diversity, thinking skills, improved written communication skills, resilience, creativity, project management and self management skills or commerciality. The only thing the SQE can do is test someones ability to pass the SQE. The preparation for the SQE might attempt to encourage some of those things but of course only if they are part of the SQE – which they are not. Many speakers made the assumption that legal knowledge would still be gained through law degrees and conversion courses – but why would that be the case? No law degree is required and many law schools will be under huge pressure to provide an SQE focused degree for fear of not recruiting students otherwise.
- There is a fundamental mismatch between what employers appear to want and say solicitors need (what they say they want – I’m not always convinced that they know what they mean when they say these things though) and what the SQE tests. There was much talk of creativity, thinking critically and differently, problem solving, managing yourself and learning how to fail and being more resilient. The SQE cannot test those things and other than for a small number of elite and very brave non-elite institutions the SQE means a move away from those things and towards learning to pass the multiple choice tests
- In spite of all the work done by the learned associations, all the SQE rhetoric is still operating on the assumption that what we do in universities is somehow not relevant to practice, can’t be quality assured and is not to be trusted. Varying pass rates, different curricula, different approaches and different assessments are presumed to mean that standards cannot be guaranteed. The problem about fitness to practice which is what regulation ought to be concerned is avoided and instead turned into a fundamental distrust of academics. But I agree with Richard Moorhead on this – the problem is more likely to be at the work place training end. The ridiculous consistency of people passing their training contracts is far more worrying than different institutions having different pass rates at LLB and LPC to me.
- There are apparently still people who think the SQE can deliver equality, diversity and inclusion benefits. There’s no evidence of this. If it reduced the cost of qualifying dramatically, maybe, but it can’t do this – you still need a degree, you’ll have to pay for the test, you’ll have to prepare for the test, you may fail the test and have to do it again… This cannot be significantly cheaper than degree plus LPC and funding option may disappear (for example the availability of loans for Masters degrees means that many LPCs are available in LLM versions so funding is available). The type of assessment has diversity implications and I just don’t see the SRA taking this seriously. They say they will fully test and analyse the statistics including by protected characteristics… but the fact still is that if you can pay to practice repeatedly then you are more likely to be successful. AND THAT IS NOT NEUTRAL
- Obviously we did not really talk about the ghettoisation of legal service provision and how the SQE might widen the gap between magic circle and high street. I can’t help thinking about the careers adviser I had at my school. When she saw my choice of A-levels and what I wanted to do with my life she said, well you won’t get into vet school – why not be a vet nurse? I said that I wanted to go to uni though and she asked me what for and why I’d want to waste my time doing a degree if I could get a job. I wonder what she will be telling kids at that school about becoming a solicitor, whether she understands the differences between solicitors and different firms and that the cheapest, most obvious route via an SQE ready degree might look great for these kids but is likely to funnel them into dead end paralegal jobs. I can’t help thinking about the girl at that same school who wanted to be a human rights lawyer but didn’t think she would be accepted anywhere because she came from the council estate down the road. Her teachers were telling her to stay local because she’d fit in better. I told her to be bold, that it would be awful at times, that it was a different world but that as much as I love working for the sort of institutions that I have worked for and now work for, they are sometimes just not good enough – she went to an elite uni- hated it but got to where she wanted to be. I can’t help thinking about the countless conversations with students about what they want to do, about repeatedly having to say – great – but you will have to do more and be better than those at Russel Group institutions, you will have to work harder and you will have to be lucky. And that’s without creating a real division in types of programmes. With the introduction of the SQE those who need the rigorous academic degrees most to help them to get to where they want to be are even less likely to access them. I feel utterly defeated by this.
- Of the lawyers or former lawyers who spoke, all totally normalised long hours. There was talk of 90 hour weeks and it was framed in terms of work ethic and being ambitious. I’m sorry but working 90 hours a week is not ambitious, it’s not having a good work ethic, it’s, pardon the language, fucking stupid! Maybe the perceived competency problem and consumer complaints are actually problems of exhaustion and not being able to function and of burn out and having been ground down. This is insanity! And no resilience is not about learning to deal with that shit. That’s not resilience. You have not failed if you can’t work those hours – you are human. Oh and maternity leave – it’s for baby things (what do I know!) and having coffee with your friends etc – it is not for re-training, setting up your business, working yourself to death… and if you take a part time job 4 days a week you don’t have the other 3 days to work on your business. Just stop. THIS IS NOT NORMAL.
- There are people who see the SQE as a massive opportunity and apparently think that it will free law schools from the shackles of regulation to be free to innovate. No no no just no. This is just so naive. The SQE will have a huge impact and makes it more difficult to innovate not easier. The SQE can actually only deliver on some of its promises if law schools take on the role of training students for it. The SRA is banking on this happening. (I say let them bank on it and screw them, let’s just collectively decide we’re not doing that and instead uphold the integrity and rigour of our programmes). So what happens to in depth teaching of legal subjects? Family Law? Social Welfare Law? International Law? Anything Socio-legal? The underlying assumption here is also really problematic. We’re not sitting around in our ivory towers happily doing what has always been done. We are constantly thinking about how we can change things, teach differently, engage our students, help them achieve those light bulb moments…
- Who chose who was invited to speak? Why weren’t the learned associations asked? Why not those who actually research these issues? With one or two notable exceptions is was an impressive line up of non-experts, people sort of wheeled out as representing something when in fact legal services weren’t represented well, law schools weren’t and in spite of Alex’s insistence that the student voice was really important to Legal Cheek there wasn’t a single student speaker.
I could probably go on and on and on but this gives you a flavour. I’m still a bit confused by it all. And I’m exhausted from trying to understand, from trying to work out what it is I’m missing, from forcing myself to have the confidence to know I’m right on this because the thing that perhaps took me by surprise the most is how easily my confidence in what I know and believe can be rocked by a bunch of men in suits spouting utter nonsense. After all, what could a girl from a small town in West Yorkshire possibly know about this? It took a two mile people and cyclist dodging run to clear my head and restore some sanity.
This conversation is going to continue and I’ll be back to participate but for now please do chat amongst yourselves while I re-charge.
Brexit and Law Schools – my thoughts
I attended an event at Northumbria University today. It was titled Brexit and the Law School and I was asked to contribute some thoughts on ‘Learning, Teaching and the University: The Changing Shape of the University Community’. Below is a summary of my brief talk. I’ll try and summarise the rest of the day’s discussion in another post
- Law Schools are, in my view, distinct little communities within the wider university community, within the wider local, regional and national communities and, again in my view, communities are shaped by those who inhabit them. Therefore, to understand the impact of Brexit on Law Schools we need to understand how Brexit might change the make-up of the Law School and university communities and what that change might mean on the ground
- So how will the make-up of Law School and University inhabits change post Brexit? We don’t know!
- Here’s what we do know
- UCAS figures show that applications from UK students for Law Courses for 2017 entry are up by 7% whereas applications from EU students are down 3%
- UCAS figures also show that applications from UK students across the board for 2017 entry are down by 4%, whereas applications from EU students are down by 6%
- The proportion of EU students studying law is relatively small when compared to the proportion of EU students studying some other subjects
- The number and proportion of EU students varies quite dramatically between institutions
- There is lots of anecdotal evidence that EU national academic staff are considering or actively looking to leave the UK and work elsewhere in Europe or the rest of the world
- There is also anecdotal evidence of EU nationals discounting the UK as a possible destination for work
- However there is also anecdotal evidence of EU national colleagues making plans to stay in the UK long term and also of some recruitment of EU national staff since the referendum
- The UCU survey about academics’ views on Brexit suggests that 76% of non-UK national academics are considering leaving the UK. That’s pretty damning. However, I would urge caution over that figure because ‘considering’ is very different from ‘planning to’ and the considering may be the result of quite significant uncertainty. Thing may change as we get clarification on what rights exactly will be available to our EU colleagues
4. This leads me on to what these figures don’t tell us
- Whether they are a trend or a blip. The applications for Law from EU nationals are still higher in number than for the 3 years running up to 2016 so was 2016 just a bumper year and we are returning to ‘normal’?
- What will the figures be over the next 5-10 years? Only once we know that can the data really tell us something about whether Brexit had a significant impact on the number of EU national (law) students in the UK
- If it is more than a blip, is it really Brexit or the uncertainty around Brexit that has caused the drop?
5. In short we don’t know how the make-up of Law School inhabitants might change. We really don’t. But let’s assume the worst – that we will loose the majority of our EU students and colleagues and that we will loose access to the Erasmus+ programme and research mobility/exchange programmes – what would the impact of that be? Well I think it would be devastating. I think we could see
- a shift on who and what is valued in Law Schools
- a more inward looking and insular approach to scholarship and teaching
- less engagement with EU and international issues and in particular with non-common law issues and approaches
- less well rounded curricula -explicit and hidden
- a reduction in the opportunities to learn from each other and a loss of the sort of creativity that happens when you tackle a problem together with people who bring different ways of thinking and doing things to the table
- less tolerance for different ideas and approaches and ways of thinking
- less well rounded lawyers – whether academics, practitioners or ‘just’ citizens of (a possibly much more narrowly defined) world
So my question really is – how do we make sure that we don’t become insular and inward looking law schools that irrelevant to the rest of the world or possibly just irrelevant?
My Conversations 