How To Teach Law

Hi, I'm Imran Bhatia. I'm due to start a training contract with the city firm next year and I'm a tutor at City Law Tutors in London. To teach law and further educational level, a post-graduate teaching qualification is increasingly useful and there are a number of specialized further education certificates you can apply for.

Teaching at further education is often part-time, so you can be teaching alongside say, working in practice. To teach law at higher education level, you may need a degree beyond your undergraduate degree and you may also need to have taken some of the professional legal qualifications such as the LPC for a solicitor or the BPTC for a barrister. You will certainly need to have done these if you wish to teach law at an institution offering these courses which is a law school.

When teaching law at a higher education institution, this can often be part-time so you may be lecturing elsewhere or you may even be working in practice as a barrister or solicitor at the same time. Alongside these qualifications, it could be really important to build up your experience. It is possible for example to gain teaching experience alongside your post-graduate degree study and many universities actually encourage this.

It will also be worth trying to develop the skills that you would need to be able to teach law. These include conveying information in a way that your audience will be able to be receptive to and to appreciate, and also being able to lead discussions on often controversial and thought-provoking issues. Any experience you may be able to gain that helps you able to develop these interactive skills would be really useful alongside of course, a good academic record and a requisite qualification. .