The return of the crammer: private ownership and the missing data in legal education

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Omar Mashjari, Associate Professor of Law and Head of the School of Law and Criminology at Liverpool Hope University, writing in a personal capacity.

In August, Matt Innes set out on this blog the case for Lincoln Bishop University joining Global University Systems (GUS). A new company in the group will run the university, and a charitable foundation will act as trustee of its founding endowments. Spencer Withrington notes that Lincoln Bishop would be the first English public university to pass into for-profit ownership.

The model has a precedent in legal education. In 2012, the College of Law, which the Law Society had formed in 1962 to train solicitors, sold its teaching business to Montagu Private Equity for about £200 million. The charity kept the proceeds and became the Legal Education Foundation. The degree-awarding powers went with the business, which gained university title in November 2012 as the University of Law. Times Higher Education called it the UK’s first for-profit university. Its first accounts recorded £177 million owed to other companies in its group. Montagu sold the university to GUS in 2015. Jim Dickinson has since described the result as ‘degree-awarding powers as an asset class’.

An old market restored

The Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE), introduced in 2021, opened the preparation of solicitors to any provider. Its design recalls the nineteenth century, when the Law Society examined candidates and commercial tutors known as crammers prepared them for a fee. The best known, Gibson and Weldon, merged with the Society’s own school in 1962 to form the College of Law. The University of Law now dates its origins to the firm’s formation in 1876.

Today the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) sets a single examination. It states that it does ‘not regulate training providers that offer SQE courses’. Anyone may sell preparation, and public money meets part of the cost. Providers place SQE preparation inside master’s degrees that attract postgraduate loans, and students at investor-owned universities can take tuition fee loans for their law degrees.

Choosing without the data

A student buys such a course once and learns its value only when the results arrive. Such a market depends on published results.

When the Legal Services Board (LSB) approved the SQE in 2020, the SRA undertook to publish pass rates by training provider. In March 2025 the LSB said it expected the data ‘by autumn 2025 at the latest’. In December 2025 the SRA said it had ‘not had confidence in the quality of the data collected’. Candidates must now report how they prepared before seeing their results. Five years after launch, the SRA has published no pass rates by provider.

Results are also unequal. In the January 2025 sitting of SQE1, the first of the examination’s two parts, White candidates sitting for the first time passed at a rate of 70 per cent. The rates were 49 per cent for Asian or Asian British candidates and 37 per cent for Black or Black British candidates.

The missing data matter most to candidates who pay for themselves. Research for the SRA found that under the old system employers paid the vocational course fees of 45 per cent of White students. The figures for Asian and Black students were 24 and 26 per cent. Candidates who fund themselves choose on price and marketing claims.

The law degree still counts

Analysis by Kaplan, the SRA’s assessment provider, found that university rank explained more of the variation in SQE1 scores than any other factor it measured. The choice of university therefore matters, and law recruitment is rising. UCAS recorded 28,590 applicants placed on law courses on results day in 2026, up from 24,590 in 2024.

The for-profit universities have grown faster still. Higher Education Statistics Agency data show the University of Law growing from 8,350 students in 2017/18 to 19,730 in 2024/25, BPP from 10,005 to 31,490 and Arden University from 3,700 to 32,740. On Withrington’s reading of the latest outcome data, each of the three falls below at least one minimum threshold set by the Office for Students (OfS) for continuation, completion or progression. These figures cover all subjects. The OfS does not publish law outcomes grouped by type of owner.

What regulators should do

Over two in five providers forecast a deficit for 2025-26. More governing bodies will therefore weigh offers of private capital, and two obvious reforms would let students and policymakers test what that capital delivers. The SRA could publish pass rates by training provider and by the university where each candidate took a first degree, with context on each provider’s intake. It promised the first of these in 2020. In addition, the OfS should publish outcomes for each subject by type of owner, measured against benchmarks. When a provider changes ownership, it should also publish its assessment of how the purchase is financed and what debt the institution will carry. At present, the OfS decides whether a new company may register and hold degree-awarding powers and university title but it does not approve or block the change of ownership itself (though it does assess the provider’s financial sustainability).

Both regulators already collect most of the data needed. They should publish them before the next university changes hands.