Board Update
Message from the Board
This is the second update to stakeholders for 2025. The CEO provided the previous update earlier in February, addressing financial and operational matters.
This update is from the Board of Governors, addressing matters of strategy and positioning.
Strategic Review Associated with 2024-27 Strategic Plan
All organisations need from time-to-time to return to the question of core purpose and to review the fundamentals of structure and strategy supporting that purpose. 2024/25 marks the first year of the College’s 2024-27 Three Year strategic planning cycle and so it is an appropriate year for the College’s Board of Governors to conduct such a review.
An original driving purpose for creation of the College of Law in the mid 1970’s was to democratise entry to the legal profession which was perceived at the time to be too narrowly dependent on academic gradings and personal connections, especially those associated with the system of Articles of Clerkship, as it then applied.
The abolition of Articles and establishment of the first Practical Legal Training (PLT) courses from 1974 created a single baseline education system for admission of new graduates to practice as well as open, fully funded access for all law graduates from all backgrounds.
Subsequently, in the mid 1990’s, Commonwealth and State sources for this kind of funding were being withdrawn and the College was re-established on a fee-for-service commercial model in line with similar trends in higher education worldwide, although with continuing support from Commonwealth student loan schemes such as Fee-HELP, thereby ensuring continuation of the principle of democratic entry.
Now in the mid 2020’s regulatory and funding patterns are changing again and it is time for the College to rethink how it can best assure its founding objectives whilst also continuing to exert the strong financial management/business administration acumen which have been such important parts of its success to date. That success has been focused on two separate but equally important fields of activity:
- Core Training Activities
Ongoing generation-by-generation effectiveness of core training activities, increasingly national and international in character in recent decades:
- support national admission, mutual recognition of license
- tuition fee level maintenance (less than 0% p.a. over past decade)
- CPD, post-graduate Applied Law qualifications.
- Public Purposes of the Legal Profession
Activities to support the public purposes of the legal profession, including with respect to:
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- bursaries and scholarships
- extending role and influence of the Australian profession in the region & beyond
- community support activities in and around the law, including the work of the Centre for Legal Innovation (CLI)
- contribution to the public purpose sectors of the legal profession more generally.
Rebalancing Focus
The current strategic review remains focused on these two priority fields of activity but is also intended to rebalance corporate effort between the two fields and to re-emphasise community and public purpose components of the College’s overall portfolio of activities, including as a first step:
- major extension of current bursary/scholarship programs in PLT with immediate application to the community law sector including prospectively from 1 March 2025, persons employed in Community Justice Centres, the Aboriginal Legal Service and Legal Aid who commence their PLT shall be provided with a half bursary so the PLT fee payable by the person is $4600.
- dedicated education support to legal career development of practitioners working in Community Justice Centers, Legal Aid and the Aboriginal Legal Service.
Standards, Local, National and International
An important concern of the 2025 strategic review will be around the question of ensuring standards as the profession now comes to review course prescriptions from the late 1990’s which are now, on one interpretation, a quarter of a century out-of-date. This work will need to happen in context of the APLEC[1], LACC[2] and CALD[3] review processes now separately occurring, as well as impending outcomes from the Chief Justice’s survey in NSW. The College needs to dedicate more resource and effort to these important review processes and the work to be done to translate them into new prescriptions best suited for the impending century.
The College also needs to be deploying more resource and energy toward the problematic question of ensuring academic standards, in an environment where student use of coursework-sharing websites is widespread and generative AI poses a major challenge to all higher education institutions, nationally and internationally.
The College has developed an action plan to ensure academic integrity, focusing on –
- reliance on oral assessment as the sole means of summative assessment in the College’s PLT program – this has been a feature of the program since 2015
- training students in the ethical and professional use of generative AI
- re-design of learning activities to incorporate the effective and ethical use of generative AI and to assure engagement with learning outcomes
- aligning the use of generative AI in our courses with the ethical standards required for the use of AI in legal practice
- minimising the opportunity for plagiarism by using AI to create a much larger and varied pool of learning activities to assign to students.
This action plan has been provided to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) in compliance with TEQSA’s requirements and will be further strengthened and enhanced into the next triennium.
A strength of the College’s response to date is its systematic incorporation of oral assessment and mentor feedback strategies into its overall assessment regime and there is much there to be extended and improved in the interests of future stakeholders in the legal profession.
Chairman Summary
The update we provide here announcing the next tranche of changes in the community space is part of an ongoing review but the Board has taken the view that it should be announcing its next initiatives now, in order to keep its stakeholders fully informed about forward progress as it occurs. Please expect more to come after the Board’s Planning Conference (14-15 March), particularly in the area of scholarships.
The College remains forever committed to continuous improvement of its services to the profession and focusing its activities in a way which directly support the interests and needs of the profession as it goes about its important work in service of the community and the nation.
More generally in relation to the College’s Practical Legal Training (PLT) please see attached Fact Sheet.
Sincerely
Joseph Catanzariti
Chairman
College of Law
[1] The Australasian Professional Legal Education Community
[2] Law Admissions Consultative Committee
[3] Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities
