At The College of Legal Practice, we pride ourselves on our fully remote, inclusive offering. As specialists in SQE Prep, we’ve found that many of our fellow universities seek our expertise and partnership to bring vocational prep to their own students, on this remote basis. In this note, I’ll share my reflections and more information about our approach to university partnerships, how we’ve led successful HEI collaborations, and how we’ve structured them.
Our partnerships
As a higher education institution (HEI), we have several partnerships with both firms and other universities. We have active partnerships with Manchester Metropolitan, York Law School, Winchester, Keele, Middlesex, Southampton Solent, with more partners incoming for the 2025/26 academic year. For most of our HEI partners, our offering allows them to give their students a clear route to SQE preparation, building upon their existing academic staff and extending their vocational offer by utilising our clear, established pathway, our expertise and our resources.
Why our partners choose us
For many of our partners, providing a clear route to qualification alongside academic teaching is highly appealing, but hard to actualise. Our expertise provides a clear pathway to extending their offer, all done remotely.
There are further reasons as to why working in collaboration has become highly appealing to other HEIs. Setting clear expectations and boundaries is one example. In our collaborations, all partnership students remain a student of their home university, bound by their university’s regulations, structures and functions. We support, as opposed to replace, their existing university environment. As we, too, are a registered HEI, we’re bound by similar quality assurance practices as our partner universities, giving our partners confidence that we do our due diligence too.
We’ve found that our link tutor relationships are also really key. All our partners provide a named link tutor that forms that bridge between home university and the College, who is usually a course leader at the home institution. We connect this individual with one of our own module leaders, and find this method keeps things highly smooth and efficient. We find partner HEIs really value this clear structure and relationship. We also have a robust orientation process for all partner students, in whichever capacity they are joining us.
Our ‘remote first’ method is also popular with our partner institutions. Students need never leave their own campus in order to engage with the courses and modules we offer, with all teaching and monitoring delivered via our online learning portal, Canvas. This method of learning will likely be familiar to students already, whether they use this platform or another method for their home institution.
How we structure our university partnerships
The ways in which we structure our university partnerships are as bespoke and unique as each institution. We vary our support depending on what the university partner needs and wants to offer their students. From full SQE prep to simply using our resources or ‘white labelling’ resources, we offer it all thanks to being both robust (in our HEI regulation) and flexible (in delivery).
Regulation-wise, as we are a HEI like our partners, we are bound by the OfS guidance for university programmes. As such, we have the infrastructure in place to understand the intricacies of quality regulation and assurance of standards, from allocating credits to finance, marketing, data, and course structure.
In terms of flexibility, this comes through in both our approach to pedagogy and our operational delivery. We operate to encourage wider participation in legal education, with part-time, or full-time modes of delivery and remote teaching to allow more individuals to fit their studies around their life. As this underpins our pedagogy, we’re quick to find ways to work collaboratively with other institutions to meet their needs - it’s something we do every day for our own students.
While the structure of each offer is slightly different, let’s go through some examples.
Firstly, some of our partner institutions offer an LLM programme, but want to accompany this by providing SQE preparation to their students. For example, students might take a university module, then our SQE1 Prep course, (so they are free to sit the January national SQE1 exam run by Kaplan), then repeat the process with another LLM module, SQE2 Prep, (and the national SQE2 exam if they choose). Another partner might offer our SQE Prep as a final year LLB module, like Solent. We’ve found the LLM and SQE Prep integration works particularly smoothly.
Alternatively, some HEI partners have simply used our bank of MCQ materials and feedback, with their students to utilise our expertise in this area, while still delivering preparation internally. Lastly, we also offer promotional partnership rates to some HEIs who wish to encourage their students to take on SQE Prep, but either need time to develop an LLM offering or don’t necessarily want this to be part of their course offering.
Partner with us
If your organisation is looking to better support aspiring solicitors through inclusive, flexible training solutions, we’d love to work with you.