ILEX responds to media coverage of social mobility review

ILEX has responded to media coverage that The Law Society and Bar Council will contribute to a review of social mobility. The review is to be led by the government’s social mobility chief, Alan Milburn, and has been launched alongside a government white paper on the topic.

Writing on The Lawyer magazine’s website, ILEX has stressed that we are delighted to see that the issue of social mobility is being taken seriously by the Law Society and the Bar Council. However we’d like to emphasise that ILEX has always served as a highly accessible route to becoming a lawyer. Around 84,000 people have chosen ILEX to study to become a lawyer, and 75% of our members are women and 15% of ILEX students are black or from a minority ethnicity.

According to the findings of our member research exercise conducted in December 2008, just 2% of all legal executives have parents who are lawyers. For 85% of members, neither of their parents had been to university. What’s more, over a third of ILEX members cited that the main reason they chose ILEX as their path to the law was because they could not afford to study at University, whereas our qualifications typically only cost around £6000 to complete. As such, ILEX believes that we are already providing fundamental opportunities for social mobility within the profession.

As Bridget Prentice MP, Ministry of Justice, once said of ILEX “Opportunity has always been at the centre of ILEX’s philosophy… ILEX trains, develops & encourages people to reach their full potential.”