The Government is currently recruiting an additional 6,000 or so Magistrates in the hope it might help clear the backlog of around 300,000 outstanding Magistrates' Court cases.
In order to do the work they do, those 6,000 additional Magistrates need to be supported by professionally qualified Legal Advisors. Experience shows that HMCTS, for whatever reason, struggles to recruit and retain Legal Advisors.
A significant proportion of newly recruited Legal Advisors come from those who have completed the vocational stage of barrister training. I shall refer to these as new barrister Legal Advisors. Despite having been called to the Bar, these are not fully qualified barristers as they have not completed pupillage and are therefore unable to obtain a practising certificate from the Bar Standards Board. New barrister Legal Advisors are against the clock, as they only have five years to obtain pupillage in order become a fully-fledged practising barrister.
Every year there are far more individuals called to the Bar than there are pupillage places. Employment as a Magistrates' Court Legal Advisor can be a convenient stop gap for a budding new criminal barrister to sharpen their skills before successfully obtaining pupillage a couple of years down the line.
HMCTS does not offer pupillage in-house, so any new barrister Legal Advisor wishing to obtain pupillage has to apply elsewhere. This means the service is losing a significant number of new barrister Legal Advisors, as they cannot progress their careers at the Bar by remaining at HMCTS.
Off the top of my head I can immediately think of three new barrister Legal Advisors in this situation, each of them leaving HMCTS for pupillage within the next 6 months or so. They are all very bright, enthusiastic, capable individuals - the very people the service should be nurturing and helping to develop their careers. Sadly it just doesn't happen.
Moving forward it would be nice to see HMCTS come to some sort of arrangement with the Bar Standard Board that allows it to offer pupillage in-house to new barrister Legal Advisors. Doing so would improve retention, as they would not need to immediately look elsewhere for pupillage.
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