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OK, so you’ve decided you want to be a barrister – an excellent choice as it is a great career. But before you can even think about your future practice you need to complete the vocational component of Bar training. This is where you start learning the skills and knowledge needed for real practice at the Bar.
Just a little background for the uninitiated… Bar training is regulated by the Bar Standards Board (BSB) which decides what subjects you need to study on the Bar training course, the standards you much achieve (pass mark is 60%) and the curriculum and assessment requirements for each module. The modules are Advocacy: examination in chief, cross-examination and advocacy submissions; Civil Litigation; Criminal Litigation; Evidence & Sentencing; Professional Ethics; Opinion Writing; Legal Research; Drafting; and Conference Skills. The litigation assessments are set by the BSB and are multiple-choice/single best answer assessments. The training provider sets the remaining module assessments.
Bar training is almost unrecognisable from the course that I took back in 1992-93, when there was only one institution in London authorised to run it. There is more flexibility to choose the type of course which suits your needs, whether that be a full-time or part-time course over one or two academic years respectively or taking the two-part course where you study all the litigation modules independently (online self-study) and only attend in person for the full-time ‘skills’ modules (usually over 17-20 weeks). Choosing the type of course which will be most suitable for you, and then the provider, can be challenging but once you have made the decision and accepted an offer of a place, you will be ready to start your vocational training and taking that next step towards becoming a practising barrister.
I am in my fourth year of teaching the Bar training course at City Law School and, having come into teaching from full-time practice as a criminal barrister, it has been fascinating to see how the students cope with the move from academic study to a professional training course. So here are some of my insights for your vocational studies: ignore them at your peril!
You are no longer an undergraduate so don’t be surprised when you are not treated like one. I don’t mean that your provider won’t look after you, help you and support you through the course, but you will be expected to treat the training like job-training – that is why you are there after all! Every year during Induction Week 1 hear the Programme Director warn (advise) the students that they need to hit the ground running, keep on top of the preparation required for each session and complete any consolidation they are given – and that is for each module which they will be studying.
By the time we reach Reading Week towards the end of October students are stressed because they feel they can’t keep up or are not making the progress they had hoped. It turns out they tended to fall into one of two camps:
i) Those that thought the warnings were just meant to scare or startle them into reactivating their brain cells after a long summer break and didn’t mean anything.
ii) Those that knew that they were intelligent, capable, and hardworking so the warnings were not aimed at them.
And yet they were all WRONG and they wished they had listened!
Anyone undertaking the Bar training course is highly intelligent and academically capable, even brilliant, but you are not undergraduates, thinking two-dimensionally, anymore. You are postgraduates expected to think three-dimensionally, and it seems to be that final dimension that catches students out. No longer are you being given information or asked to research something and comment on it, you are being asked to absorb information which is mostly new, then understand and apply that knowledge to real life practice, whether it be understanding how to make an application to set aside summary judgment, or how to prepare a set of papers so that you can cross-examine a witness, or grasping the basis for using practice directions or procedural rules. None of this has any similarity with any studying you will have undertaken in the past and if you want to succeed, you need to embrace it from day one. Those that do, will cope with the enormous workload, and find time to moot, undertake voluntary work in a legal advice clinic, prepare for pupillage applications and interviews and maybe have some time left over for a social life! Treat the course like a full-time job and you will start to build the resilience you will need for your future profession.
Getting yourself away from the ‘student’ mindset is not going to be easy so start by thinking about what being a pupil will be like. As a pupil supervisor for many years, I can tell you that you will be expected to turn up on time and prepared, undertake any tasks set to a high standard, be able to explain what you may have learned or absorbed from the day’s experiences and undertake any necessary preparation for the next day or next task when you find time during the day or when you get home. This will happen five days a week for 20+ weeks as a first-six pupil and in your second-six (another 20+ weeks) you can add to that appearing in court and/or undertaking your own work.
OK, so back to the course. You will have a timetable or timeline, dates for formatives and final assessments, so plan ahead. Remember that there is no safety net of lecture recordings to fall back on – if you miss an advocacy session you have lost the opportunity to practise, get feedback and improve; if you miss a drafting session, how will you know what you did right, and what you didn’t. If you get into a routine from the start, you will be able to keep on top of the heavy workload and make the most of your time at whichever institution you have chosen to learn with.
Learning a new skill is hard. It is never as easy as people make it seem and there’s a good reason for that – those people have made mistake after mistake and learnt from them, building up their experience and command of the skill. Unfortunately, if you want to learn to be a better advocate or draft better particulars of claim, someone needs to tell you what you did wrong, so that you can correct it, and this can be tough on your confidence.
Instead of seeing criticism or negative feedback as discouraging, see it as the opportunity to improve. As a practitioner you will continue to learn, evolve, and develop your skills; even experienced KCs will tell you that there are always new things to learn. As someone on the first rung of a long ladder, embrace the feedback, implement it, and then look for the next thing to build on.
As a practitioner the benefit of being a junior on a serious trial was exciting – the chance to work with a KC or senior practitioner on a more complex case with novel legal aspects or new areas of expertise. But for me, the opportunity to watch how more experienced colleagues (good and not so good!) dealt with the case and issues was priceless.
Most providers will teach skills in small groups (usually between four and six students) and when one of your classmates is performing and receiving feedback, don’t switch off, but watch closely and listen. Evaluate the performance yourself – what was good? What was not so good? Did they take a different viewpoint of the evidence, and did you understand why? Start thinking like a barrister would – how might you counter the argument, respond to the XX or do it differently? Listen to their feedback and make sure you avoid their pitfalls.
If you want to get pupillage you need to show commitment to the profession, an ability to do what is needed, resilience, aptitude, and an excellent Pupillage Gateway application form. You will be in competition with everyone doing the course and all those who are reapplying because they were unsuccessful the previous year, or two years before or those on the GDL. Wherever you choose to undertake your Bar training there will be help, support and advice available, opportunities to moot, join a Legal Advice Clinic or other pro-bono work and something akin to the Pupillage Advisory Service (PAS) that we have at City, where a practitioner will look at your application and guide you on how to enhance it, run mock interviews and workshops on interview advocacy, invite chambers, practitioners and the judiciary to speak to you about how to get the best out of the process. Make use of these! Year after year I see the students who take up the help offered getting the best outcomes. So why would you ignore that obvious advantage?
I hope these tips will help to prepare you for your vocational studies and what will undoubtedly be a roller-coaster ride: whether you embrace it with arms held high or close your eyes tight till the end is a matter for you!
Alexia Zimbler practised at the Criminal and Family Bar for over 25 years before switching to academia. She is now a Senior Lecturer at City, University of London and teaches on the Bar Vocational Studies programme.
OK, so you’ve decided you want to be a barrister – an excellent choice as it is a great career. But before you can even think about your future practice you need to complete the vocational component of Bar training. This is where you start learning the skills and knowledge needed for real practice at the Bar.
Just a little background for the uninitiated… Bar training is regulated by the Bar Standards Board (BSB) which decides what subjects you need to study on the Bar training course, the standards you much achieve (pass mark is 60%) and the curriculum and assessment requirements for each module. The modules are Advocacy: examination in chief, cross-examination and advocacy submissions; Civil Litigation; Criminal Litigation; Evidence & Sentencing; Professional Ethics; Opinion Writing; Legal Research; Drafting; and Conference Skills. The litigation assessments are set by the BSB and are multiple-choice/single best answer assessments. The training provider sets the remaining module assessments.
Bar training is almost unrecognisable from the course that I took back in 1992-93, when there was only one institution in London authorised to run it. There is more flexibility to choose the type of course which suits your needs, whether that be a full-time or part-time course over one or two academic years respectively or taking the two-part course where you study all the litigation modules independently (online self-study) and only attend in person for the full-time ‘skills’ modules (usually over 17-20 weeks). Choosing the type of course which will be most suitable for you, and then the provider, can be challenging but once you have made the decision and accepted an offer of a place, you will be ready to start your vocational training and taking that next step towards becoming a practising barrister.
I am in my fourth year of teaching the Bar training course at City Law School and, having come into teaching from full-time practice as a criminal barrister, it has been fascinating to see how the students cope with the move from academic study to a professional training course. So here are some of my insights for your vocational studies: ignore them at your peril!
You are no longer an undergraduate so don’t be surprised when you are not treated like one. I don’t mean that your provider won’t look after you, help you and support you through the course, but you will be expected to treat the training like job-training – that is why you are there after all! Every year during Induction Week 1 hear the Programme Director warn (advise) the students that they need to hit the ground running, keep on top of the preparation required for each session and complete any consolidation they are given – and that is for each module which they will be studying.
By the time we reach Reading Week towards the end of October students are stressed because they feel they can’t keep up or are not making the progress they had hoped. It turns out they tended to fall into one of two camps:
i) Those that thought the warnings were just meant to scare or startle them into reactivating their brain cells after a long summer break and didn’t mean anything.
ii) Those that knew that they were intelligent, capable, and hardworking so the warnings were not aimed at them.
And yet they were all WRONG and they wished they had listened!
Anyone undertaking the Bar training course is highly intelligent and academically capable, even brilliant, but you are not undergraduates, thinking two-dimensionally, anymore. You are postgraduates expected to think three-dimensionally, and it seems to be that final dimension that catches students out. No longer are you being given information or asked to research something and comment on it, you are being asked to absorb information which is mostly new, then understand and apply that knowledge to real life practice, whether it be understanding how to make an application to set aside summary judgment, or how to prepare a set of papers so that you can cross-examine a witness, or grasping the basis for using practice directions or procedural rules. None of this has any similarity with any studying you will have undertaken in the past and if you want to succeed, you need to embrace it from day one. Those that do, will cope with the enormous workload, and find time to moot, undertake voluntary work in a legal advice clinic, prepare for pupillage applications and interviews and maybe have some time left over for a social life! Treat the course like a full-time job and you will start to build the resilience you will need for your future profession.
Getting yourself away from the ‘student’ mindset is not going to be easy so start by thinking about what being a pupil will be like. As a pupil supervisor for many years, I can tell you that you will be expected to turn up on time and prepared, undertake any tasks set to a high standard, be able to explain what you may have learned or absorbed from the day’s experiences and undertake any necessary preparation for the next day or next task when you find time during the day or when you get home. This will happen five days a week for 20+ weeks as a first-six pupil and in your second-six (another 20+ weeks) you can add to that appearing in court and/or undertaking your own work.
OK, so back to the course. You will have a timetable or timeline, dates for formatives and final assessments, so plan ahead. Remember that there is no safety net of lecture recordings to fall back on – if you miss an advocacy session you have lost the opportunity to practise, get feedback and improve; if you miss a drafting session, how will you know what you did right, and what you didn’t. If you get into a routine from the start, you will be able to keep on top of the heavy workload and make the most of your time at whichever institution you have chosen to learn with.
Learning a new skill is hard. It is never as easy as people make it seem and there’s a good reason for that – those people have made mistake after mistake and learnt from them, building up their experience and command of the skill. Unfortunately, if you want to learn to be a better advocate or draft better particulars of claim, someone needs to tell you what you did wrong, so that you can correct it, and this can be tough on your confidence.
Instead of seeing criticism or negative feedback as discouraging, see it as the opportunity to improve. As a practitioner you will continue to learn, evolve, and develop your skills; even experienced KCs will tell you that there are always new things to learn. As someone on the first rung of a long ladder, embrace the feedback, implement it, and then look for the next thing to build on.
As a practitioner the benefit of being a junior on a serious trial was exciting – the chance to work with a KC or senior practitioner on a more complex case with novel legal aspects or new areas of expertise. But for me, the opportunity to watch how more experienced colleagues (good and not so good!) dealt with the case and issues was priceless.
Most providers will teach skills in small groups (usually between four and six students) and when one of your classmates is performing and receiving feedback, don’t switch off, but watch closely and listen. Evaluate the performance yourself – what was good? What was not so good? Did they take a different viewpoint of the evidence, and did you understand why? Start thinking like a barrister would – how might you counter the argument, respond to the XX or do it differently? Listen to their feedback and make sure you avoid their pitfalls.
If you want to get pupillage you need to show commitment to the profession, an ability to do what is needed, resilience, aptitude, and an excellent Pupillage Gateway application form. You will be in competition with everyone doing the course and all those who are reapplying because they were unsuccessful the previous year, or two years before or those on the GDL. Wherever you choose to undertake your Bar training there will be help, support and advice available, opportunities to moot, join a Legal Advice Clinic or other pro-bono work and something akin to the Pupillage Advisory Service (PAS) that we have at City, where a practitioner will look at your application and guide you on how to enhance it, run mock interviews and workshops on interview advocacy, invite chambers, practitioners and the judiciary to speak to you about how to get the best out of the process. Make use of these! Year after year I see the students who take up the help offered getting the best outcomes. So why would you ignore that obvious advantage?
I hope these tips will help to prepare you for your vocational studies and what will undoubtedly be a roller-coaster ride: whether you embrace it with arms held high or close your eyes tight till the end is a matter for you!
The Chair of the Bar reports back
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Harmony Christian Ministries is the latest charity to benefit from a £500 donation from AlphaBiolabs via the company’s Giving Back initiative
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Mário Barroso, Head of R&D and Method Development at AlphaBiolabs, examines the forensic science underpinning hair drug testing, its evidential scope and limitations, and why it remains the gold standard for evidencing patterns of drug use in family proceedings
Developing a tech start-up demands a different definition of excellence to the Bar, says Saara Idelbi. The co-creator of Advocatr on entrepreneurship, AI advocacy training, and matching the thrill of a killer cross-examination
At the start of her term, Chair of the Bar 2026 Kirsty Brimelow KC set out a series of priorities for the year ahead. One of those priorities was children in the justice system
As the world becomes more digital, Barbara Vinagre Mota examines international research into the mental health consequences of judges’ exposure to graphic and immersive evidence, highlighting the importance of support systems
Reviewed by Daniel Barnett
James McNeill Whistler at Tate Britain until 27 September Rothko in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi until 23 August Reviewed by Stephen Cragg KC
