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I am in favour of reforming the way that solicitors are trained but the way it is done is also important.

Over the past 20 years law schools have churned out thousands of graduates who were unable to find a firm willing to take them on for a 2-year training contract. Many of these people then spent years working as paralegals with no or little hope of ever qualifying as a solicitor.

The inflexibility of the route to qualification had left these people in debt and with little hope of achieving their career aspirations. Also, it deprived those many firms that were unable, perhaps due to their size, to offer 2-year training contracts to talented people who could have then become a real asset for their firms.

Even now, there are many practices who are unable to put a viable succession plan in place.

However, what angers me is that Co-op, being a new entrant to the market, is now able to offer apprenticeship schemes so that it can cost-effectively train the lawyers of the future in a more flexible way. Why is it that this option has for so long been denied to existing solicitors' practices and to trainees who do not want to work for Co-Op? Also, why is this scheme exclusive to Co-op staff?

That said, I hope that the Co-Op-MMU initiative does offer something more than low-cost, commoditised online education.