I’m always torn when the subject of social mobility rears its head, as it does in this week’s analysis. After all, law genuinely struggles to counter the UK’s ridiculously variable standards of state education.
The profession is based on structured learning, and it’s hard to utilise bright kids if schools can’t give them the foundation upon which to build complex professional training. But where does such ‘counsel of despair’, as David Morley puts it, lead? Increasingly, the result looks like a profession which, on some measures used by researchers, is becoming more socially exclusive as the impact of post-war mobility dies.
