Academic overload There has long been a debate among providers and practitioners about the role of hands-on experience as a constituent part of legal education.

There has been a recent demand for more focus on the 'academic' as compared with the 'practical' in the context of university law courses.

In the same issue, under the headline 'Universities slammed on legal education', the Gazette reported on comments made to S2K delegates about the failure of law schools to properly equip students for the vocational stage and calling for undergraduate programmes to be made more practical (see [2000] Gazette, 9 November, 9).

Is the fundamental issue here not whether a constituent element of the curriculum is 'academic' or 'practical' but what the student learns effectively from the experience? If we wish to produce technically competent, professionally skilled and ethically sound lawyers, then more attention should perhaps be focused on the process than on the label.

If by exposing students to real-life settings and problems they develop their capacity for analysis, research and problem solving what better setting can there be for demonstrating their understanding of the law and its application? For this reason the role of a clinical methodology is as relevant to the education of the undergraduate lawyer as it is to the student on the common professional examination, legal practice course or bar vocational course.

Learning by doing and reflecting on the doing is a vehicle for developing deep understanding.

On the way, the needs of clients, in real-client clinical programmes, and of both students and prospective employers - regardless of the career destination - can be addressed.

Let us have no more of the 'practical v the academic'.

Instead, let us teach and learn more effectively, using a combination of methods and processes designed to support that learning.Richard Grimes, director pro bono services and clinical education, the College of Law, Chester