Canadian law students studying abroad fear degrees won't be recognized thanks to remote learning

Lorne Richardson was eager to make a career splash once he finished his undergraduate degree in January 2020. But the pandemic had different plans.

Richardson was laid off from his hospitality job when COVID-19 arrived, so he decided to go back to school and applied to a popular law program in the U.K. that's long been accredited in Canada.

"The job market froze up, and I decided I had to get a very professional degree under my belt," he told CBC News.

He's now entering his second and final year of the program, but with just weeks to go before the semester begins, he's been told the degree likely won't amount to much.

Richardson is one of more than 150 Canadian students enrolled in the JD Pathways program at the University of Leicester in England. It allows Canadian students to finish their law education in two years instead of three, with the caveat that once they return to Canada, they must pass a series of accreditation exams before continuing their careers.

The program has been accepted by Canada's National Committee on Accreditation (NCA) for 14 years.

Richardson did his first year remotely because of the pandemic, and with the Delta variant currently surging in the U.K., professors at the school have planned to do a mix of online and small class learning for the upcoming school year.

But the NCA remains steadfast that law students must have at least one full year of in-person learning. For second-year students like Richardson, that means his two-year degree will be useless without additional in-person schooling.

"We really can't do anything," he said. "We have to either defer, or pretty much drop out of the program and try to figure out if we're going to different university."

NCA approval out of reach

The NCA is a standing committee of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. Part of its mandate is to assess the legal education and professional experience of people who receive credentials outside Canada.

In years past, recognized programs were supposed to have 100 per cent in-person instruction. But the NCA revised its policies in July 2020 to accommodate pandemic learning, and only required 50 per cent of in-person learning over the course of a degree.

In June, it amended policies again, but still requires that accredited programs have at least one full year of in-person instruction.

Troy Lavers, a Canadian professor at Leicester, said the school was preparing for a blended model of recorded lectures and in-person tutorials for the upcoming semester, hoping it would meet NCA criteria while U.K. officials tried to control the spread of the Delta variant.

"They said no, it wasn't sufficient," Lavers said of the NCA. "So we're very disappointed in that because we feel like that's the safest way to go during the pandemic.

"We'd like to get back to face to face teaching, but no one is certain about what's around the corner with variants."

Lavers said students who finish the Leicester program will still be required to complete an additional year of in-person instruction.

"It's going to be an additional cost to them, and I think it's a burden they don't necessarily need to have," she said.

In a statement, NCA executive director Deborah Wolfe said "the goal of the NCA program is to ensure that anyone applying to a law society for a licence to practise law has the same level of legal education, whether they went to law school in Canada or anywhere else in the world."

An emailed correspondence between a student and Wolfe regarding the upcoming school year was shared with CBC News.

In it, Wolfe wrote that in-person instruction was important because "lawyers typically discuss legal problems with other lawyers."

She wrote, "The law school experience — involving face-to-face interactions with instructors as well as students — models that experience."

Students like Richardson believe school's plan for small in-class tutorials would have solved that problem.

That's why they're pushing the NCA to be more flexible with regards to the in-person learning component, but with weeks to go until the school year starts, the uncertainty weighs heavy.

"We are under a massive time crunch right now," he said. "It's definitely disheartening."