ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with (legal) skills teaching in English law schools. It focuses on the teaching of ‘how to’ rather than ‘about’ in the discipline of law and argues that the key debates have not changed. They are focused on whether skills should be taught at all, what skills should be taught and how as well as at what level. While there appears to be a consensus that skills teaching is valuable, the concerns are that a neoliberal and market focused agenda has taken over the skills debate and there has been a shift away from intellectual skills towards employability skills in a way that is not compatible with an academic education. This chapter considers the employability agenda and the introduction of the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) as key challenges to intellectual legal skills and notes that the affective domain has so far mostly been neglected, before suggesting that resistance to the marketisation of (legal) education continues and spells hope for intellectual legal skills.
