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Thank you Simon Bath. I now at least know who is giving me the thumbs down.

Simon Bath. You and I are going to disagree. Yes, of course there were some good lecturers at the College of Law, but the idea that they were all somehow superb is fanciful. They weren't. To some extent it was the usual spread of good, bad, and indifferent that I have seen at many an institution.

Guildford, Lancaster Gate, Chester ... they were all recruiting from the same pool of talent, with no especial incentives for management to dispense with the services of the ones who might have been underachieving, that I am aware of. Was there a huge difference in the pass rate on the 1980s Law Society Finals Part II between the students of one centre and another?

Incidentally, when were you at the College of Law? I get the feeling that you did the six month course and are 1970s or earlier. Occasionally, someone from the 1980s Law Society Finals Part II makes a post and the drift of that post is very similar to mine.

Probably the best institution I have attended when it came to the quality of the teaching was Chesterfield College.

I once asked a tutor at Chesterfield College why she thought the teaching might be so good, and she answered that it was because they were all qualified teachers. I laughed. The real reason lies elsewhere.

Further Education Colleges have to compete for students in a more competitive market than universities and primary / secondary schools. In addition they receive government funding on the number of students who finish the course and pass the externally set and marked assessment at the end of the course.

I have taught at the Sheffield College and I remember a member of the management team being livid at a lecturer who lost all but her half a dozen or so most committed students as the course progressed. The College couldn't afford the financial hit of having those students not complete the course, let alone fail the externally set and externally marked exams at the end.

I stand by what I have consistently said: At some point there has to be an externally set and externally marked exam, anonymously marked, of course. Qualifying as a solicitor cannot be less rigorously assessed than a Further Education course.

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