A private school background is no longer a golden ticket to a law career

Pursuing a career in law is highly competitive for anyone, but students from less well-off backgrounds face an even greater challenge.

Law remains dominated by the socioeconomically privileged. Firms and chambers recruit large numbers of students from a narrow group of elite universities, where students are more likely to have attended private schools or come from relatively affluent backgrounds.

Few law firms report social mobility data, but where they do the figures show that almost 40% of graduate trainees were educated at private schools, which only 7% of the general population attend.

In 2014, 26.6% of solicitors had attended a private school, according to data from the Law Society. A report from educational charity, the Sutton Trust, shows that this figure rises to 32% of solicitors at partner level, and up to 51% of partners at the five magic circle firms – Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Linklaters and Slaughter and May – which are traditionally viewed at the most prestigious.

A little more positively, over half (50.5%) of solicitors were the first generation in their family to attend university. Statistics for the bar are less readily available, but the Sutton Trust’s report shows that, of 100 leading QCs in 2015, 71% had attended private schools and nearly 80% had gone to Oxbridge. Among senior judges, 74% had attended private schools and the same percentage had gone to Oxbridge.

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Major firms, including Hogan Lovells and Norton Rose Fulbright, also work with Aspiring Solicitors and the Sutton Trust’s Pathways to Law programme, to support academically able students in year 12 and 13 from non-privileged backgrounds.

Alicia Clark, the first in her family to go to university, is a final-year law student at the University of Southampton. She says she thought the legal profession was “hostile towards those who came from particular backgrounds or attended certain education institutions”.

But the programme, she says, helped her gain confidence and an understanding of what she needed to do to become a solicitor, and changed her perception of the profession. “I don’t believe the profession is biased towards those who come from certain backgrounds, as long as these students have the necessary assistance they require when considering such a profession,” says Clark, who will start a training contract in 2017.

Read her full piece here