Democracy or dumbing down?

The announcement by the skills minister, Matthew Hancock, that the government will expand apprenticeships to allow lawyers to qualify without a university degree, seemed at first sight curiously retrograde. When I qualified as a solicitor in 1959, a number of my contemporaries had gone straight from school at age 16 into articles. Others—the “ten year men”—with long service as managing clerks, were able to qualify without articles. All had to pass the final examination. By the 1970s, however, a degree had become a condition of admission to the profession, except for a few who had reached the highest standard demanded by the (now Chartered) Institute of Legal Executives. Hancock’s ideas are already foreshadowed in schemes adopted by such firms as Irwin Mitchell and Pinsent Masons to take advantage of the CILEX route to qualification.

Of course it only became practicable to insist on a university degree when there were sufficient places to provide an adequate flow of recruits to the