Emma Crowely, Chair

The mission of the Law Society’s Law School, Diploma Centre, and Law Society Professional Training (LSPT) teams is to enable solicitors to provide excellence in legal services to the public through the delivery of effective professional legal education and training. The Curriculum Development Unit (CDU) helps to oversee the achievement of this objective.

The CDU membership includes solicitors from firms of all sizes, the in-house sector, Law Society staff, and academics. As part of its role, the CDU meets with the Law Society teams managing the delivery of the different Professional Practice Courses (PPCs), diploma programmes, certificate programmes, and continuing professional-development training courses.

The CDU reviews the Law School’s curricula to ensure that the courses offered at every level are of the highest possible standard. The CDU also suggests improvements for existing courses, topics for potential new courses and, if considered appropriate, adoption of same by the Law School through the Law Society’s Education Committee.

In 2025, the CDU considered documentation for the different courses being delivered by the Law School as part of the PPC. The committee also received updates on the work of the Law Society’s Diploma Centre and LSPT teams. Other topics considered by the CDU during the year included the Law Society’s Access Scholarship Programme, the Law Society’s biennial review of the PPC and the resulting changes to course content, and the different services provided to trainee solicitors and qualified solicitors by the Law Society’s Psychological Services team.

The CDU also considered several externally led advanced elective modules for approval during the year, with these advanced electives being delivered by law firms under the Law Society’s Fused PPC model.

In June 2025, several CDU members participated in a trip to London to meet with representatives from Hogan Lovells LLP, BPP University Law School, and City Century (an organisation promoting the adoption of solicitor apprenticeships among London law firms) to find out more about the solicitor apprenticeship programmes being delivered by these organisations. The purpose of this trip was to learn more about the adoption of the solicitor-apprenticeship model in England since its introduction in that jurisdiction in 2016, with a view to considering how a similar model could potentially be adopted in Ireland to operate as an alternative route to qualification for school-leavers and law clerks/legal executives in this jurisdiction.