The Solicitors Qualifying Exam will not reduce inequality in recruitment, according to these law academics

The Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) will not achieve its aim of widening access to the legal profession because it does not address the “inequalities inherent in the higher education system”, two respected legal academics have warned.

As Legal Futures reports, Dr Jessica Guth of Leeds Beckett University and Dr Kathryn Dutton of York St John University said that SQE will not change the fact that most law firms focus on which university a candidate attended and what their A-level results are when deciding whether to offer a training contract. Failure to look past these indicators perpetuates inequality, they said.

The development of SQE preparation courses was also criticised, as the two academics argued that such courses would result in “working-class students yet further encouraged to end up in universities seen to be ‘second class’ both by themselves and others”.

Writing in The Law Journal, Guth and Dutton have called for firms to instead focus on adopting blind recruitment practices, which would prevent recruiters and interviewers from forming opinions based on a candidate’s school and university.

They said: “We need to acknowledge the reality that unless these firms significantly change their recruitment practices, they are excluding a very significant proportion of very talented young minds simply because those young minds cannot, by accident of where they are born and who their parents are, demonstrate… middle-class status and socialisation…

“Pursuing a career as a solicitor therefore does not mean the same thing for all law students and we should be honest about the fact that for many their career choices are limited well before they even set foot in a university.”