Work and Class episode 2: Talking outreach with former Law Society President I. Stephanie Boyce CBE

Tom Heys and Sophie Jameison sat down with I. Stephanie Boyce CBE, former President of the Law Society, to talk about why employers heading into schools isn’t just a nice thing to do—it can actually change lives. From careers advice to sparking ambition, Stephanie shares insights on how outreach can help level the playing field and open doors for young people. A thoughtful, inspiring conversation about why social mobility starts before the first job.

Transcript

This is the Lewis Silkin social mobility podcast. 

Remember careers advice at school for some it was helpful for others. It was a VHS tape, a one size fits none quiz and a very determined man who thought we should all be dental hygienists. For me, the quiz said I should be a van driver or a train driver or a lorry driver, basically any kind of driver, which I think says more about the quiz than just about my own career ambitions. I didn't know about the jobs that were out there. I didn't know what I didn't know. So today we're talking about outreach. 

How employers can work with schools to raise aspirations, build connections and help young people imagine different futures. 

With me is Sophie Jamieson, an employment lawyer at Lewis Silkin who leads all of our outreach activities and we're also joined today by someone who's made it her mission to widen access to the legal profession, former president of the Law Society, Stephanie Boyce. 

Thanks, Tom. It's great to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me, Tom. Great. So we've got a few questions for you both. Let's go through. So first, let's talk about background, I suppose, and journeys into law. So both of you, what was careers advice like when you were at school? Do you want to kick us off, Stephanie? Well, OK.  

So for me, I don't remember much careers advice, I think it was almost non-existent. So I didn't actually get from what I can recall any direction from my school. And I do apologise if my recollection is not correct. so I think that's one of the reasons why I have made it absolutely instrumental into going back into schools. And Sophie, in fact, you joined me in 2020 or 2019 we first met I think Stephanie talking about how to reach more young people. Absolutely and we at that time went into a school in Great Bar just outside of Birmingham or I think part of Birmingham where a very diverse school in terms of socio-economic background, terms of languages spoken, religion and so forth.  

So for me it's trying to raise awareness around the advice that is out there because there is much more advice out there and schools have got better. So, but for me, I didn't have that access to careers advice. I had to find that elsewhere. Yeah, and I come at it from a slightly different angle, Tom, in that I was privately educated and the careers advice that I had at school was very good. And I grew up in London and we would have careers nights where people would come in and talk about their jobs in all sorts of different worlds that I wouldn't have even known about if we hadn't had those opportunities. And when I decided to become a lawyer, I knew that something that I wanted to do as part of that is to give back and make sure that other young people knew about those opportunities that were out there.

So the angle that I come at it from is I feel like I have a good knowledge from my own upbringing of what good looks like in this area. And I want to make sure that whatever your background and whatever part of the country you're in, you get the opportunity to have that same source of exposure as people in different industries that I did when I was growing up. So I think that brings it home how important it is not just to open doors, but to make sure people know that these doors even exist in the first place.  

Yeah, exactly. And that's where our outreach program at Lewis Silkin was built from. So as Stephanie said, we originally met 2019, 2020 just before the pandemic. In fact, we went and delivered this session in person in Birmingham, which was in some senses replicating what I had already been doing in London with our partner schools, but gave us a chance to get out of the immediate surroundings of where Lewis Silkin's offices are and talk to people elsewhere. 

And then only a month or so later, we found ourselves in this completely different world where the pandemic hit and we were all stuck at home on our laptops and communicating with people in a completely different remote way on video calls. And I didn't want that to be the end of what we were doing in terms of outreach. So we started thinking about what were the different ways that we could connect with schools now that they became used to having online classes. And that's where our Schools Outreach Program was built from. And Stephanie's been a great supporter of that and has attended some of our sessions. And basically, where that started was just me sitting there at home, looking at the areas of the country that might most need us. So the Social Mobility Commission had classed certain parts of the country as cold spots where there are fewer opportunities for young people to get ahead. 

I just looked up schools in those areas, emailed their careers leads or their head teacher and said, please, can we come and talk to your students? And that was five years ago and we've grown and grown from there to in the last year, we did 25 sessions reaching hundreds of students across different schools in different parts of the country, talking to them about what it means to be a lawyer. And if I can add, I think that's one of the things that's been quite clear is that lots of law firms were doing lots in London, but not so much was going on outside of London. And for me, it was very important that what we were speaking about with law firms in London and the work that law firms were doing in London, that actually in their own backyard, as I would say, that it was taken further.  

And when I, as an officeholder of the Law Society, one of the things we or I established was the ACT initiative, which was Achieving Change Together. And part of that looked at social mobility. We held a series of social mobility round tables up and down the country. And I'll never forget where one firm reported back that a student who I think was based just out of Manchester was asking, did they need a passport to come into Manchester to take up work experience? So one of the things I talk very passionately about is that as a legal profession, we do lots and great work around social mobility and other initiatives, but we've got to make it more up and down the country as opposed to just London focused.  

It's amazing how much of a lottery it all is. Not talent, because that's everywhere, but exposure to the economy at large, suppose, for young people to know what sort of different careers are out there and what they look like. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the most important things that we have have learned from doing our outreach is when you go in and you talk to students at school age, they're so interested and they want to learn but you should assume absolutely zero knowledge because we're going into areas where quite possibly the young people that we're talking to don't know anyone who's in a professional occupation just because of the part of the country that they live that might be nowhere near a big city where these opportunities tend to be. Things are changing a bit post pandemic, are opportunities spread a bit more in terms of remote working.  

But if you are a couple of hours away from a big city, you know, maybe you live in a coastal town or maybe you live in a very rural area, you just wouldn't necessarily know about these opportunities at all. So one of the things we really try to do is a bit of myth busting with our presentation. So we go in and we do some true or false statements that test people's assumptions about what a lawyer is. You know, they might think that lawyers are in court all the time, but actually most of our lawyers at Lewis Silkin don't attend court as part of their job, or they might think that lawyers have to wear silly wigs and some do but not all do. So just testing those sorts of assumptions and broadening their horizons in terms of what a lawyer can be. 

Great. So I think we've established the case for outreach and why it's an important thing for employees to be doing and the impact that it can have. Let's talk though about the challenges for disadvantaged students. 

So what do you see are the biggest challenges faced by students from less advantaged backgrounds and how can outreach help? 

I think one of the challenges, there's many challenges for those who come from a disadvantaged background. 

And speaking from my own personal experience, some of that is financial, some of that was social in terms of having those networks to draw from, withdraw from. And much of that still is very significant and relevant to this day. and I guess not being able to tap into those networks. So Robert Peston, for instance, founder of Speakers for Schools, because he recognised much of what Sophie was speaking about, that those in private institutions could draw on those networks and individuals would come in and speak and so forth, or work experience was available to them. Whereas in other schools, state schools, that wasn't the case. And to this day, far too often, that remains the case. And I know there are a number of initiatives that have been put in place to try and address that. 

The government has mentioned in terms of universities, trying to get them to do more, to try and help establish more job prospects for potential graduates. Because that's the other thing, is that whilst you can be on a trajectory to go into university, graduating from university, it's no in. So one of the things that I experience, why I'm so passionate that actually this has to start as early as possible rather than at university was because when I got to university, I didn't know what that path, that trajectory looked like. And it was an organization that I came across and was able to get onto their program that then said, have you applied for law school? Have you applied for funding? Have you done this? Because I didn't have that knowledge within my own family, within my own community network to ask. And far too often that remains the case. And so, 

One of the reasons why I focused as an office holder on social mobility and still focus on it is because there are, we talk more about it now as a nation, but we don't like to talk terribly much about class. There is a huge divide in this country around access. And that was one of the reasons why I was clear and determined to try and widen that access to coming into the profession. 

And we mentioned earlier about talent is found everywhere. And one of the things I talk about in the stream of chaos that is around some administrations around the world as they roll back in terms of diversity and push merits is that I don't have an issue with merit. The difficulty that I have with those who are recruiting on merit is that it's not been applied equally or fairly. And so this is a reminder that actually that talent is found everywhere and anywhere, but we have to give everyone equal opportunity and access to those opportunities. And that's not always the case because of individuals who don't know where they can find it to start with. And the other thing, when individuals come into businesses, whether that's a law firm or a business, 

We need to do a lot more than just get them in and kind of leave them. We have to recognise that some individuals will need a bit more help than others, whether that's in terms of how do we onboard, how are we onboarding them in terms of behavior expectations in the work environment, how they should dress, conduct themselves and so forth. And actually how transparent is the career progression thereafter. 

It's thinking a lot more from as early as possible and what that trajectory looks like to ensure that there is success to those individuals when we bring them into our business. 

Lots of things to think about. Let's go back to talk about outreach programs. So those people listening to this podcast might not be doing much in their own organisations currently and might be thinking what could they be doing? So let's try and make it easy for those people. So what are the key things that those looking to do outreach need to consider to make it effective? 

Targeted, relevant, and much more than just one session and out. Yeah, I think one of the first things to think about is who is your target audience? There's a lot to be said for getting in very early and we work with an organization that does outreach sessions in primary schools. But the sessions that we do, we tell schools that our sessions are specifically aimed at at GCSE level and above. the teachers know who in their school to be offering it to. And so that we're thinking about what sort of level are the students who are talking to at. And if you were going younger, then you would maybe give a bit less detail on exactly what the path is to getting into a career in law, which is something that we cover in our sessions and maybe a bit more just on what is a lawyer and why would this be an exciting job to do.  

So I think knowing your audience is really important at the outset. Our sessions are remote, so we try to be engaging and to get a bit of interaction with the kind of true and false questions that we ask. But we need to bear in mind that you do have that barrier when you're delivering a session remotely. So we try and have slides that are dynamic and interesting to try and hold the students attention. We have more than one speaker so that we can cover a diversity of backgrounds and areas of law. And the way that we design our sessions is to start with absolute basics. So what do the students think a lawyer is and what actually is a lawyer?  

We speak a bit about our own careers as lawyers, so that will be different for whoever is presenting and bringing bit of yourself and your own background and journey, I think is really, really important to give the students something to connect to. We like to give examples of the sorts of exciting work that lawyers do that the students might not have thought of, like the fact that within our firm, we have people who... 

advise on sports sponsorship deals, for example, which is tends to be very interesting to teenagers hearing about how the, know, the sponsor name that are on their favorite football team shirt comes to be there. Those sorts of areas of law that people don't necessarily know about. And then we try and give really practical tips of how to pursue a career in law if that's what they're interested in. So things like work experience, but also learning to apply their own experience in interviews, regardless of whether they've got legal work experience.  

You know, if you've got, say, caring responsibilities at home, that's something that you could and should be talking about in interviews, because that will show how you've stepped up and you've managed to manage your time. And I think people think that experience that they have that isn't in the workplace or isn't directly sector relevant, isn't worth talking about, but you know, a part time job. 

Working in a shop or a pub is really important experience at learning to deal with customers and that sort of thing. trying to encourage students to think about their own experiences in a different way that makes them sellable to employers. To try and take a bit of pride in their own achievements. might not, that there might be a tendency to undersell these things, like you said, caring responsibilities, incredibly important, so much hard work. 

Jobs that people do during study. Absolutely loads of important skills can be gained from that and to try and tell these young people that these are valuable experiences that employers will make good use of. Definitely and it could be more valuable than some forms of work experience where you know say someone their uncle's friend works in a law firm and they go in and they sit at a desk for a week and they can put it on their CV, but they didn't actually do anything. That's actually less valuable than having a part-time job or a volunteering opportunity or something where you've actually learned some leadership skills and time management skills that you can talk about. But I know that Stephanie has organised and led work experience. 

Schemes that are much more valuable than just sitting behind a desk and doing nothing for a week. So I wonder if Stephanie could tell us a bit about that. Well, absolutely. And before I touch on that, one of the other flip side of what you've been speaking about, Sophie, is that actually, when we are opening up the law and the legal profession to students, it's also making them aware of the justice system, which is something that I have long campaigned about getting law taught in schools. 

Added to the national curriculum to try and address some of the gaps in access to justice. But in respect of some of the activities, one of the activities that we took part in, Sophie and I recently, was at the Houses of Commons where my local MP approached me and asked would I get involved in terms of, it was a four-day programme, 

One day was spent at the Houses of Parliament and the students would have a tour. They were by application on the programme and all the schools, as I understand it, in that constituency was written to and students had to apply. 15 students were selected and as I say, on one of the days, the third day, they were brought to London and I was asked to put together, well initially I was asked to speak for two hours around the law, and thought, my goodness, what am I going to say for two hours? And then I thought, I'll contact Sophie. And it went from there, actually. Sophie then said, I'll bring a barrister. You've never said no to me, which is amazing. But you bring a barrister. I then called up the Treasury Solicitor and said, Susanna, I need a favour CEO of Justice, which is a charity, a reforming body that I sit on as well. 

And a professional basketball player who initially, as colleagues said, they couldn't quite square what professional basketball player had to do with the intersection of law and politics. Students loved it. didn't. They loved it. They loved it. He was talking about mental health, his own challenges with mental health and why it's important to look after mental health. But I think it's fair to say that our session was absolutely well received, But certainly the feedback and the difference opening up the world, our world of the law to students. And I think one of the things that fed back was how they didn't recognise, guess, readily recognise the different options open to them coming into the law because we all represented different backgrounds. 

As to where we've taken our own legal careers, but equally the intersection of law and politics and why it makes a difference. Yeah, and the students were so engaged and I think it goes back to what you said right at the outset, Tom, about there being so much talent out there. And I was really blown away by what a group of 16, 17, 18 year olds could have to say about law and politics. You know, they were just had so many really interesting questions and made you feel like the future of the legal profession or politics, if that's what they go into, is in safe hands because, you know, people can be quite patronising or despondent about young people, I think, but actually, the more you talk to people, the more inspired you are, I think, by the possibilities for the future. 

I think that's that trip to Parliament sounds like an incredible experience these young people had. think for many, Parliament may as well be Hogwarts, this sort of mythical place where stuff happens, but we're not quite sure what. So giving people a glimpse of these spaces and that they feel like they belong there, it sounds like a really valuable experience they've had, and I'm sure they'll remember that for a long time. But it also sounds like something that other employers could try and replicate themselves. Stephanie, said it came about because of an MP's involvement. There's MPs everywhere. There's no reason they couldn't all be running similar things.  

And that's exactly what we're working on, Tom. So we wanted to get this pilot off the ground. And then what happened was across the house, there have been a number of MPs or certainly their office managers who are interested in how this can be taken into their own constituencies and replicated there. I one thing I really learned from that session which comes over and over again in outreach sessions too is that once you're... 

in the legal industry, you can really forget the amount of lingo and jargon that we have that makes us seem inaccessible. Like you say, Tom, that, you know, the houses of parliament seems like a completely different magical world. And I think often the big tower blocks and skyscrapers in London feel like that too, to outsiders. Exactly. The one that we're sitting in right now of Lewis Silkin's offices and you know, sometimes we have students come and visit our office and just the highlight, even if they've only come from down the road is coming into a building like this and looking around and, and seeing how offices work 

And the other thing, of course, is that anyone talking about visits, anyone can contact their own MP and ask to visit Parliament. So that is something that can be done. Not many people are aware of that. But certainly for aspiring students going into any profession. 

Certainly I would highly recommend it. Yes, and we were also encouraging students at the Work Experience Programme to just go along to a court because anyone can go to court as well and just watch legal proceedings happening and that's something you can put on your CV as well or application to say, you know, I was in my local Crown Court the other day and watched a sentencing happening or something like that. That's exactly what I did. I went down to the Crown Court and saw sentencing happening and I remember it quite distinctively. It was a guy's birthday and he was getting sentenced for a gun crime and he got eight years. What a birthday present. Wow. Taught you to stay on the right side of the law, 

As an aside, so Stephanie, you mentioned about anyone can write to their MP. I learned recently from my grandfather that that's exactly what his father would do. He would write to his MP, and this was probably about 1910 or something, so long ago. He would write to his MP and say, I'm coming down to London. Can I come and hang out? And he would hang out and watch the debates. And then I think he'd end up going for a drink with the MP as well afterwards. Well, you can't get better than that. 

And I can also say as well that the Law Society, dare I say it, the Law Society, the building on Chancery Lane, you can go in and visit. And in fact, there's a really good reason to go in there and visit. You might even see an oil painting of yours truly. 

How do you measure the impact of your outreach work and how successful it is? And how do you do that over the short and the longer terms? Honestly, in terms of measurement, I think that's something that we're still working on because our program has been going for five years now. And, you know, if we're talking to GCSE level students, then we may not yet be at the stage where any of the people we've spoken to have necessarily entered the workplace. So it's definitely a long-term thing where we want to stay in touch with people and understand how their careers have progressed. But in terms of how we're ensuring that we're creating a lasting impact, our program starts with the outreach. So these single one-hour remote sessions that are really easy for the school to schedule with us. 

We hope that that's not where our programme will end and we stay in contact with schools. So we have a newsletter that we send out to schools and to students to give tips on general career skills, but also getting into a career in law. We have an essay competition that we run every year to give students the opportunity to be able to say, on their CV that they won the Lewis Silkin essay competition to try their hand at expressing their thoughts on paper about an important legal issue. And we hope that our winners of those competitions in the past will go on to achieve great things. I think at least one of them has gone on to study law. And we have a bursary program for students at university to help them in their studies so that financial worries aren't something that hold them back. We have a work experience program, and we have an apprenticeship program, which we make sure that we advertise to all of the schools that we work with.  

So we try and have lots of different routes by which we can maintain contact with the people that we've met via the outreach. So everything kind of, in theory, flows together into one seamless journey from inspiration to employment. 

Absolutely. And I find that a lot of the students that we speak to then go on to follow or add us on LinkedIn. And I hope that via that, I will in a year or two or three, see them begin to post about their careers in law and be able to hear the good news about where their careers are going. We have also, I think, worth mentioning here, we've made a public statement, we have a target that 

By 2033, we aim to have at least one person who we first got in touch with through the outreach schemes that we do to be working for us in a qualified lawyer role. It's a very long-term aspiration. We're a couple of years into that now, but that's a public effectiveness of our outreach. And hopefully, we will be able to achieve that. 

By then, if not sooner. That's the dream. And Stephanie, I don't know if you've got any tips on how to kind of turn a one-off interaction into long-term change and access to the industry. Well, for instance, lots of us collect data. So, but it's important that we do something with that data. I recently came across an organisation I was asked to work with where they had collected data two years ago. 

And we're still sat on the same data having done nothing with it. So I think it's important that if you collect it, you do something with it, but also feedback. So the work experience that we spoke about with the MP, as you know, Sophie, the feedback was shared with me and I shared it with the team who supported me on that day. And that feedback will be used to shape the work, the template that we produce and take forward. 

So it's important to hear the voice of those who've taken part. But also, as you spoke about, Sophie, that the longitudinal tracking, you like, that you're tracking it over a period of time as opposed to just, and even if it's just a one off, but if you can see where the measurement is coming in, then that's important as well to inform your work going forward. 

Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us and for everything that you're doing to help make the legal profession more accessible. think if we can summarise briefly what we've talked about today, outreach is very important. It can be relatively straightforward for employers to do, certainly not expensive, takes perhaps a bit of time, but you need to identify some schools. 

Doing sessions remotely can make it really efficient and mean that you can cover lots of schools in lots of different areas across the country. And make sure that whatever it is you're doing is definitely not just a one-off session, raising aspirations and failing to deliver upon them, but taking steps to deliver upon them.

Things like newsletters are again free or at least cheap to do and something that any employer could try and do. So I think the message here is that it can take a bit of work, it can definitely deliver results, but it certainly is within the reach of all employers to do more to try and raise aspirations across the country. 

Thanks, Tom. 

Thank you, Tom. If I may say so, collaboration is key. What a great note to end on. And with that, we'll be back soon with another episode.