College of Law vs Kaplan vs BPP: law schools vie for top spot
Legal education providers across the country have started to jostle for supremacy in response to the recent relaxation of LPC rules by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).
Giles Proctor
In one of the biggest shake-ups in legal education history, the SRA recently unveiled the official list of institutions that are to launch the so-called ‘LPC 3’ from September.
The announcement has revealed that many institutions are using the new, more relaxed LPC guidelines to revamp courses, with some providers, including BPP Law School, introducing fast-track options.
In a radical move by BPP, the LPC is being slashed from 10 months to just seven and a half months for those trainees due to join one of the firms in the five-strong City LPC consortium, which comprises Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith, Lovells, Norton Rose and Slaughter and May. The new course will have two intakes per year, February and August, with the first cohort due to start next month.
BPP is also launching a third branch in London later this year in premises opposite Norman Foster’s iconic Gherkin building. The school announced last week that it had secured a new site in Bristol - days after its arch-rival the College of Law (CoL) went public with its plans to open in the city.
After a shaky start Kaplan Law School, the newest entrant in the London legal education market, recently signed up its seventh LPC client and at the start of the month secured validation from the Bar Standards Board to run its first-ever BVC from September 2010 for up to 60 students.
Kaplan, the London arm of Nottingham Law School, is also about to introduce a new part-time LPC from September 2010.
But Kaplan chief executive Giles Proctor denies that the steady expansion of the school will saturate an already overcrowded legal education market.
“We plan to grow further, but we want to grow by quality and evolve at a comfortable pace,” he insists. “I think there’s enough room in London for us because it means that students now have a choice.”
A choice they may have, but with nine schools in London already providing LPC courses to students who are finding it increasingly difficult to secure training contracts, is there really a need for them all?
Nigel Savage
According to CoL chief executive Nigel Savage there is. “People will always want to go into law,” he says. “Eighty-eight per cent of our students find jobs in the legal services market - not all of them as lawyers, but in the legal services market nonetheless.”
But just as law schools continue to bolt extra courses onto their growing academic rosters, they are also competing in an arms race over how many law firms they can sign up as clients. BPP, for instance, has just added Reed Smith at its sixteenth LPC client.
BPP dean Peter Crisp says pairing law firms up with education providers does not remove choice from students and is instead a sign of “healthy competition”.
“We believe law firms and trainees should have a choice of where studies can be undertaken and that they’ll be the ones who ultimately benefit from healthy competition,” he stresses.
Meanwhile, Kaplan director Peter Anderson hopes that Kaplan’s own success in gaining more clients will extend further into the UK legal market.
“Mayer Brown was the first to join us because it was an American firm and knew the Kaplan brand from the US,” he says. “I hope more US firms sign up with us because there are a lot of great business opportunities because of our links in America.”
And although Kaplan only has immediate plans to move into vacant rooms at its London premises as it gets bigger, the school has not ruled out following in the footsteps of the CoL and BPP and expanding outside the capital.
Some say Kaplan is trying to run before it can walk, and with only 300 validated LPC places for September 2009-10 compared with 2,920 and 4,480 from BPP and the CoL respectively, you would have to agree.
This is, however, a considerable improvement on the 2007-08 academic year, which saw just 53 LPC and 12 GDL students successfully enrol with Kaplan in its first year.
Peter Crisp
Elsewhere, BPP Holdings, the owner of BPP Law School, has agreed to be taken over by US-based Apollo Global, a joint venture formed in 2007 between Apollo Group and private equity house The Carlyle Group, for £305m.
Although BPP would not comment on the move, its rival the CoL is speculating that the venture would see the legal education provider begin to focus more on undergraduate courses.
“Apollo is a massive sausage machine for delivering degrees and it’s going to take advantage of the monopoly BPP has in the private sector here of degree-awarding powers,” contends Savage.
BPP already plans to launch a new two-year law degree. It will start from September 2009 and will be aimed at students who want to fast-track their studies. The course will cost a total of £9,750 if students book all their modules together.
“With all the changes being made by the SRA, as well as BPP introducing programmes like this, there’s going to be no quality assurance in the market,” argues Savage. “There will, of course, be casualties in all of this, but the market will decide. At the end of the day it’s up to the students to buy into a trusted brand.”
Readers' comments (17)
Baby Farks Mageezak | 13-Jul-2009 11:07 am
It's astonishing that BPP is trying to become the biggest provider of legal education considering it's absolutely hopeless.
I studied one module with them and throughout the application process I made it abundantly clear that was all I was studying. Yet when it came to sending me an invoice it was for the full cost of the GDL and it took numerous phone calls and emails to even begin the process of rectifying that, even then it took them three tries to get it right. I wanted nothing to do with them ever again and I hadn't even started the course.
I just hope the wheels fall off the BPP brand, although how they ever got there in the first place is beyond me.
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Anonymous | 13-Jul-2009 1:17 pm
Baby Farks...the admin side of BPP is very poor, but the teaching is excellent
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Anonymous | 13-Jul-2009 2:42 pm
I'm afraid I don't fully agree Anonymous 1. My experience of BPP over two years has been that they have a number of excellent tutors, but also many very poor ones (especially on the GDL). The lecturers are generally pretty good.
The problem all these tutors and all students face, to my mind, is that BPP have created a method of teaching and assessment based heavily on rote learning of their own manuals/solutions. Lessons are rigidly structured and assessments are through repetition of in-lesson exercises. No credit is given for independent thinking or wider knowledge, even in academic contexts. The idea seems to be to make it all idiot proof, and perhaps more people pass as a result, but it is likely to significantly diminish a person's independent learning skills over time, and increase their cynical sense that it's all a game, not an education.
I don't hope they fail now they've used these methods to grow so fast. I hope they transform what they are offering from mechanical to meaningful in a hurry. Right now, students are glad to have passed but few would say they have gained much of the 'value added' they could have done in another context, even if taught by one of the truly excellent teachers.
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Anonymous | 13-Jul-2009 3:19 pm
'BPP have created a method of teaching and assessment based heavily on rote learning of their own manuals/solutions. Lessons are rigidly structured and assessments are through repetition of in-lesson exercises. No credit is given for independent thinking or wider knowledge, even in academic contexts.'
Strangely, that was more-or-less the same criticism I had of the College of Law's LPC...
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Anonymous | 13-Jul-2009 11:43 pm
I found the focus on practice a breath of fresh air at the College of Law.
The open book exams meant that I had to learn how to do things. It was great to do more than merely memorise loads of materials just to regurgitate it in the exam. As a commercial litigator in practice I didn't do any company law at all. Then a client needed me to run some company meetings and it all came flooding back with ease. Remarkable.
In contrast, much of the material that I learned for closed book exams at uni went in for the exam and is now lost in the mists of time.
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Anonymous | 17-Jul-2009 5:13 pm
Frankly, the standard of education from all these private providers are poor.
The solution is the scrap them altogether, and offer a professional law degree within universities (similar to most other countries), followed by bar exams, and then on-the-job training.
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Anonymous | 17-Jul-2009 11:03 pm
Definitely, universities law degree is always better but as for me, I have no choice to go to King's, for example, as I need GDL and have to join one of the private providers London offers. Extremely difficult choice as I see that quality and conveyor teaching may be disappointing. The City Law School may stand a bit separated, are you agree? still hesitating
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Anonymous | 20-Jul-2009 12:46 pm
I can only speak from experience of BPP as I chose to complete the LPC there even despite not loving their 'rote learning' teaching methods in the GDL. I was in fact pleasantly surprised, I wonder whether your criticism about regurgitating material could have been because of the format of the GDL in my mind is literally about how well you can memorise material. To learn the law in 18 weeks, you need to have a good recall! The experience improves with the LPC as at least the exams are more practical and relevant to an actual career in law. Although some still criticise this course for being mundane.
I do agree with the comments about tutors, yet wherever you learn, there are always going to be some shining stars, and others who you feel you're left to your own devices and struggle.
However I resent some of the above comments. Spoon feeding only works if you're prepared to put in the hours. I would disagree with comments that BPP love handing out passes, I know many people who failed a few modules, or sturggled to get top marks. Perhaps the reason a lot of people pass is because the majority are very smart people, the kind of hard workers who you would expect to do well. The rest of us work our socks off, and achieve unimpressive results, but nevertheless made it through what is in all fairness a very intense course, wherever you take it. The regulatory bodies have - and rightly so - ensured that wherever you go you should expect much the same quality of education. And as an individual only ever (thank goodness) complete the course once, no one will ever really get a good idea of the real differences between providers after buildings, and snazzy advertising.
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AnonymousJJ | 23-Jul-2009 8:06 pm
Given that budding solicitors are (usually) wholly concerned with securing a training contract, then surely it works in their favour that BPP offers a focused, albeit narrow course where they are more likely to score high marks and could impress an employer, particularly as both institutions are equally reputable. When it comes to real legal practice though, does the academic and seemingly more rigorous outlook at CoL outweigh this advantage?
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MO | 24-Jul-2009 4:16 pm
I'll take your college of Law and raise you Westminster. Excellent establishment.
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Anonymous | 3-Aug-2009 12:33 pm
'BPP have created a method of teaching and assessment based heavily on rote learning of their own manuals/solutions. Lessons are rigidly structured and assessments are through repetition of in-lesson exercises. No credit is given for independent thinking or wider knowledge, even in academic contexts'.
To 'Anonymous | 13-Jul-2009 2:42 pm', I completely agree. Their style of teaching did not suit me at all. I worked extremely hard for the LPC all year and came out with an unimpressive 'pass', which suprised my tutors and peers since I understood all the concepts and contributed in class more than most. Collectively we called BPP an exam factory. Surely being a parrot does not prepare law students for practice? As much as I loved my time at BPP I now think I would have been better prepared for the exams and for practice by the open book policy of CoL.
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Anonymous | 21-Aug-2009 2:25 pm
I am about the commence on the GDL (and then the LPC) at Nottingham Law School (NLS) this September. I was wondering what people think of the university? From what I can see, BPP isnt all that its made out to be. From past experience would you say college of law is better than NLS? Nottingham have more law students (96%) who manage to find a training contract, paralegal work or other legal related work whereas - from what i know, 80% of students at the college of law seen to find legal work.
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Anonymous | 3-Sep-2009 11:00 pm
I agree with all the comments made about BPP being a slack setup. It is a sham of a company. The worst 12 grand I ever spent was on the BVC - terrible management...
Please do not do it!!!!
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Anonymous | 7-Oct-2009 11:04 pm
I have just started the GDL at BPP, and agree that the admin is terrible. But academically, the fact is they cut down a whole degree's worth of information to the stuff you need to know, and if you want to read around the subject in your own time for your own benefit, great. As for the percentage of students who find work in the legal sector, at least for the GDL this statistic is meaningless. Lots of students are doing the course for reasons other than working in a law firm.
Having said that, I do intend to carry on working very hard, and will be disappointed if BPP have withheld some vital information from me that prevents me from getting a very good grade! In that respect, the exam factory set-up may not work, as there is not enough time to answer everyone's questions.
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Anonymous | 25-Nov-2009 6:42 am
I just graduated with honors non-law degree in the US and will be applying for GDL and possibly LPC in the UK, since legal education in the US not only takes 3 more years of academics but is getting more and more expensive. I'm interested in international law and am not sure whether I'll be necessarily working for a law firm. In that context I was wondering which of the GDL/LPC providers in the UK would be the best choice, does anyone have any comments on the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice?
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concerned girl | 31-Jul-2010 3:35 am
Wow I thought I was the only 1 having problems with bpp, Ive had terrible unbelievable problems with the staff unfortunately i was really looking forward to my time there waste of my life, a jealous old lady 'tutor' started bullying me, it even escalated to me being failed in exams and given very low poor marks. The staff I had contact with were unpredicatble and selfish,they ganged up on me to listen to this old lady, trust me if I could turn back time I would forget the fake hype, that is a result of clever marketting and just go to COL, my freinds had a grand time there while I was crying my eyes out the whole year.
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New law student | 18-Oct-2012 4:35 pm
I have been accepted onth the GDL course at BBP and COL. However, regrect not applying to Kaplan. The comments I have read from above, partic' for concerned girl is a big worry! I just feel that BPP are more concerned for outcome!
Any thoughts on Kaplan, I hear their good.
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