Vacation schemes and fair access: are we prioritising talent, or availability?

With summer upon us, many firms’ attention once again turns to placements, vacation schemes and the familiar rhythm of the legal recruitment cycle, writes Stuart Kelly, Deputy Head of the Law School at the University of Strathclyde.

The vacation scheme has long played a significant role in that landscape: an important step for some, a hoped-for opportunity for others yet, increasingly, a pivotal moment in a competitive and compressed pathway into the profession.

For many students, the coming months will involve balancing competing demands: securing experience, earning income and managing the practical realities of getting through university. Some may, entirely reasonably, want to do something else over a long summer than work for a law firm.

This balancing act is not new. Students have long worked alongside their studies, often extensively. Many have done so successfully, building careers in law despite significant personal and economic difficulties throughout that journey. What is changing, however, is not the existence of that experience, but its intensity and prevalence.

The composition of the student body has shifted considerably in recent years. Law schools have widened participation, aligning with Scottish Government expectations about access to higher education. This now presents to the legal profession a far more diverse and socio-economically representative student cohort.

Yet this diversity brings with it a different set of lived realities. Increasing numbers of students now work full-time hours alongside their studies; not for experience, but for necessity. In the particular context of the cost of living crisis, summer is not a period of optional enrichment. It is, for many, a period in which income must be secured to sustain the academic year ahead.

Vacation schemes in practice

Against that backdrop, the continued centrality of the vacation scheme in legal recruitment merits closer attention. For many commercial firms, it is no longer merely developmental, but decisive: the principal gateway to a traineeship, and in some cases the dominant route. In many respects this is understandable. Vacation schemes have always provided a high-information, low-risk recruitment mechanism. They allow firms to observe candidates over time rather than through interviews alone.

The system works for firms. But the question is whether it works equally for candidates.

The structure of the vacation scheme has always assumed a degree of availability. It presumes that a student can step away from existing commitments (paid work, caring responsibilities or other personal or geographical obligations) and dedicate several weeks to a placement, in a particular location, at a particular time. For some, that remains manageable and desirable. For others, it involves a genuine trade-off between financial necessity and professional opportunity.

A question of access

Evidence from outside the legal sector suggests this is not a marginal issue. The Sutton Trust has highlighted that internships have become a key route into professional careers, yet participation remains uneven. Research suggests students from working-class backgrounds are significantly less likely to undertake internships due to financial constraints and reliance on existing paid employment.

At the same time, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has consistently emphasised that access to good-quality work is shaped by structural factors, including insecure income and wider economic conditions. This limits individuals’ capacity to engage with opportunity even where it formally exists.

Seen in this light, the vacation scheme risks functioning as more than a developmental opportunity. It becomes a mechanism of selection, one that may inadvertently privilege those with the greatest capacity to participate in its current format. The point is not that firms intend exclusion, but that the design of the system itself may produce uneven access. This is particularly relevant at a time of increasing socio-economic diversity within the student population.

The profession has not ignored these concerns. Paid placements are commonplace, and the increased use of contextualised recruitment is a significant and welcome development. Together these signal a recognition that traditional models of entry may require adjustment. Yet they do not fully resolve the underlying structural issue. Even a paid placement may require a student to disengage from other employment that may be critical to their future financial position.

Could work-based learning be a solution?

If the challenge is one of access, then the answer may lie less in abandoning placements and more in reconfiguring them. One potential direction is the greater integration of work-based learning within the legal curriculum itself. Across higher education, there is a growing recognition that meaningful workplace experience can be embedded within programmes of study and carry academic credit, rather than sit outside them as an additional hurdle.

My own institution, Strathclyde, embeds such opportunities across undergraduate, diploma and masters’ level. Approaches like this allow students to engage with professional environments on a more flexible basis, perhaps for a day or two a week over a longer period. This works alongside their studies and employment, rather than requiring a discrete block of availability.

For students, and particularly students with a range of personal obligations, this approach offers a balanced access to professional insight. Yet the placement providers also benefit. Firms have the opportunity to assess individuals over a longer period, capturing sustained performance rather than a short, high-intensity snapshot. Work-based learning, in this sense, could become a complementary part of the both the educational and recruitment infrastructures.

This is not without complexity. It raises questions about supervision, regulation and the relationship between universities and the profession. But it is increasingly consistent with wider developments in higher education, where placements and work-based learning are treated as integral elements of programme design and graduate development.

A question for the profession

The Scottish legal profession has long emphasised standards, fairness and public confidence. The Law Society of Scotland, together with the Scottish Government, has also articulated a clear commitment to widening access. If the summer vacation scheme is now the principal gateway into the profession for many firms, then it is reasonable to ask whether its current design fully aligns with that commitment.

This provocation is not that vacation schemes lack value: they do, and they have many student beneficiaries. However, their dominance as a route into the profession invites scrutiny. If access to a traineeship increasingly depends, in practice, on access to a short period of concentrated summer availability, then questions of equity are inevitable.

So as summer approaches, and as ever larger numbers of students from more socio-economically diverse backgrounds look towards the legal profession, the question may be less about aspiration and more about access: do summer vacation schemes recognise potential wherever it exists, or prioritise professional access to those with the practical capacity to engage with the system as it currently operates?