Published October 15, 2024
“Some people see things as they are and ask why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?” – George Bernard Shaw
The demand for legal education in Ghana has seen substantial surge over the past decade. Despite the expansion in admissions to the Ghana School of Law (GSL), colloquially known as Makola, since 2020, a significant number of students continue to face the challenge of securing a spot in the two-year professional law programme.
For this academic year, the numbers are staggering – out of 5,000 students who took the Law School Entrance Examination, only 1,441 made the cut, leaving 3,559 students compelled to attempt the exams once more next year. This coupled with approximately 1500 students expected to complete their LLB degrees in 2025, will further exacerbate the already protracted waiting list.
Admissions into the Ghana School of Law (GSL) have become extremely competitive with the entrance exams posing a significant barrier to many aspiring law professionals. I am aware of some individuals who have been attempting to pass the exam since 2017. This is affecting the mental health of affected students. A country that has its retirement age at 60 cannot afford to allow its citizens wanting to study law to spending seven years just to pass an entrance exams. The situation has become so dire that some parents with means are opting for legal education abroad for their children, where they can pursue professional legal education at a hefty cost.
For those who cannot afford to go abroad, their fate has become the story recorded in John 5: 1-9 where a man waited for 38 years for his healing at the bank of river Bethesda and never made it until one day Jesus came and his story changed. This is the sad and unfortunate lot of some LLB graduates.
Clearly, this is a neglected crisis and history shows we must act. We may bury our heads like the proverbial ostrich and pretend nothing is amiss. Not making it through the entrance exams does not mean one unsuited to study at the Law School. Indeed some of the students who go to Gambia or Nigeria because they are not successful with the entrance exam have been topping their graduating class.
Recommendations
Addressing the crisis in Ghana’s legal education requires a pivotal first step: amending the Legal Profession (Professional and Post-Call Law Course) (Amendment) Regulations, 2020, to introduce a new category of students: the Hybrid Track system and fee-paying student option as a way of expanding access to legal education.
- Adopt a hybrid track
Those who will be admitted under the Hybrid Track system will pursue the programme for three years instead of the current two-year duration. The first two years will be virtual with students taking three subjects each year and the final year can be on campus. The Hybrid Track students will take 3 subjects in their first year, another 3 subjects in their second year and the final four subjects will be taken in the third and final year. Under this hybrid system, students will attend in-person lectures and tutorials when the regular students take their break (July to October). There is more that we can learn from the free SHS Programme concerning the capacity utilisation of teaching and learning facilities. The quality of learning is not diminished if it is made virtual. When the covid-19 struck, the world including the GSL shifted from brick and wall to Zoom. I am reliably informed that some lecturers at the GSL sometimes use Zoom for lectures. The University of Law in the UK where some of the Ghanaian LLB holders go to do their professional law programme has 100% track and if these students can be accepted into the GSL Post-Call Programme, then we should not downplay the efficacy of the hybrid proposal.
The hybrid track will require the recruitment of new lecturers and the adoption of education technology platforms like Blackboard or Canvas. Through the deployment of best practices in delivering distance education, we can enhance the learning experience for the students under the hybrid track.
The over 4000 students who are waiting to enter the GSL cannot wait for new lecture rooms to be built across the country before the question of space can be addressed. The fact is that the constraints on physical infrastructure cannot be resolved swiftly, given the limited resources and stalled progress on the Law Village Project since its inception in 2021. If we can deploy these emergency measures for three years, we can clear the backlog, and reform the legal education system.
Fee-Paying Option
Secondly, instead of allowing LLB holders to travel to Gambia and the United Kingdom to pay hard currencies for their professional law programme, GSL should rather admit students who were not successful in the Entrance Exams as fee-paying students, based on fees determined by the GLC. This would reduce the pressure on the Cedi. We cannot continue to haemorrhage our hard-earned forex exchange to UK and Gambia. Again, the fees from the fee-paying students would add to the resource base of GSL to improve teaching and learning. For more than 25 years, public universities have quota for fee-paying students. This has improved their internally generated funds and has allowed the admission of students who meet the minimum admission criteria to be admitted.
Conclusion
In the long run, we ought to have a broader conversation about the future of legal education in the country. The UK, whose legal system and education framework Ghana modelled its own, has undergone significant structural reforms. These reforms can transform the country’s educational governance, including addressing issues of access and fairness. In the main, we should make legal education a “single transaction”:that is the LLB and BL should be merged to allow LLB holders an automatic admission into the Professional Law Programme. This will bring about predictability to students who want to study law in the country. It will be good that a Presidential Commission on the Future of Legal Education is set up to look into this. We can make this work if there is a will.
The writer is a competition economist and a lawyer. He is the West Africa Regional Director of CUTS International. Write to the author: apa@cuts.org
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