Case Study: CSET Summer School

Slaughter and May and 20 of the City’s leading law firms are backing the launch of The City Solicitors’ Educational Trust (“CSET”) Summer School, a major new charitable initiative designed to promote wider access to the UK legal profession. The objective is to encourage university students from a diverse range of backgrounds to consider a career in the law. Slaughter and May was a founding member of the CSET charity when it was established in 1989 and Howard Jacobs, one of our retired partners, currently serves as the organisation’s chairman.

The CSET Summer School will target undergraduates who may believe that they fall short of the requirements for a professional career, perhaps because they did not achieve the requisite A Level results, or because they are not studying at one of the top UK universities. Particular attention will be paid to students whose parents or guardians did not attend university. 

CSET has identified one hundred university students who fit this profile and invited them to attend an intensive one-week residential course at Imperial College, London in the week commencing 28 July 2008. The participants will have access to individual guidance and mentoring for the remainder of their time at university. The response from the university and student population bears out that the CSET initiative has struck a chord - 923 students from 94 universities around the UK applied for a place on the first course. 

This is the legal profession’s first collective diversity initiative. It will enable City lawyers to support the important cause of widening access to the profession in a manner which can only be done collectively: no one firm could undertake this ambitious project on its own. The high level of support means that the CSET Summer School programme will be repeated in 2009 and 2010.

For more information visit http://www.cset.org.uk/