Standing before an abyss : bridging the chasm in the law school curriculum and departmental student support in a post-SQE and post-pandemic landscape

Hughes-Gerber, Laura and McGuirk, Noel and Savva, Rafael (2022) Standing before an abyss : bridging the chasm in the law school curriculum and departmental student support in a post-SQE and post-pandemic landscape. In: Association of Law Teachers Conference 2022, 2022-04-11 - 2022-04-12, University of Manchester.

Abstract

The recent introduction of the SQE gave a new impetus for Law Schools across the UK to re-evaluate and realign their future curricular offerings. At the same time, higher education institutions across the world have intensified their efforts to identify how best to respond to students' constantly developing support needs amidst the transition from a pandemic to an epidemic landscape. The combination of the foregoing provides Law Schools with a unique opportunity to tackle the challenges arising from them by embedding student support provision within curricular frameworks. This paper aims to present our reflections on student support for law students in light of our in-development study on the systems tasked with the provision of student support provision within Law Schools. The paper will first outline our rationale behind supporting the embedding of student support provision within curricular frameworks, which is drawn from our reflections on the undertaking of our pastoral care roles within the Law School, the literature on the provision of student support for law students, and the nature of current mechanisms tasked with the provision of student support by taking into account the dynamic nature of students' support needs. Through this, we seek to highlight that in practice, student support should be holistic, with academic support and pastoral care being embedded in their provision across a number of support providers, including law academics. In light of this, we point to the need to study the systems of student support within Law Schools and their corresponding nature with university-wide systems of academic support and pastoral care to determine how its provision can be embedded in curricular frameworks and appropriately respond to law students' changing support needs.