The conventional wisdom is that students are unwise to do the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) without a scholarship, writes anonymous barrister-to-be Bar Trek.
Indeed, on Legal Cheek it has been argued that the Inns of Court scholarship process functions as an unofficial Bar aptitude test. There's some truth in this, but it ignores a rather important fact: many of us were forced to commit to paying for the BPTC before we knew if we had secured a scholarship or not...
Finally, a month and a half after the infamous Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) ethics exam which featured questions from a 2011 past paper, the Bar Standards Board (BSB) has issued a full response to students. Be warned, BSB haters, it's got a shrug-of-the-shoulders feel to it...
EXCLUSIVE: On Thursday 28 February, six days before Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) offers were due to be made, almost 150 wannabe barristers received an email from BPP informing them that they had places on its course. The Bar Standards Board (BSB) is not amused – with this latest breach of Bar protocol coming just three years after BPP substantially exceeded its allocated number of BPTC places...
Baroness Ruth Deech, the head of the Bar Standards Board (BSB), has revealed the pain she felt when top celeb hangout The Ivy put her on its commoner waiting list – despite having her secretary point out that she had been made a dame. Still raw from the rejection, the Baroness accompanied her confession with an angry take-down of The Ivy, describing the restaurant's food as "nothing special" and questioning the dress sense of the diners she encountered when she finally made it there...
Surprisingly, non-native English speakers don't have to sit a language test to gain admission to the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC). Lucy Pether investigates
To the uninitiated, this country's quirky system of legal education is deeply confusing. This rule applies not just to the bigger picture, but also to the details, with the level of English language competence required of non-native English speaking wannabe barristers provoking particularly high levels of head-scratching. Indeed, a flurry of foreign students have recently contacted us in despair.
Do they have to do the 'IELTS' English language proficiency test in order to get onto the BPTC, they ask. And, if so, what score do they need (because there are all sorts of different figures quoted online)? The answer, oddly enough, is that thanks to a fudge in the rules, non-native speaking students don't have to sit any language test at all to become barristers...
The final report of the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) – potentially the biggest shake-up of legal education in three decades – was due last month. But as yet there has been no sign of it...
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