The rising cost of law conversion courses is a major barrier to students from low-income families hoping to join the legal profession, one of the UK¡¯s most high-profile lawyers, Cherie Blair, has warned.

In an interview with?Times Higher Education, the wife of former UK prime minister Tony Blair and a QC since 1995 said that the chances of a young person from a working-class background such as herself succeeding as a lawyer were ¡°worse¡± than in the 1970s when she graduated from the London School of Economics.

Speaking at a summit in Hong Kong to mark the inaugural Yidan Prize, an education award worth $7.7 million (?5.8 million) annually, Ms Blair told?THE?how she might have been prevented from becoming a barrister if current conversion course fees had been in place.

Research published by the??in 2015 said that 50 per cent of partners at ¡°magic circle¡± law firms and 74 per cent of judges attended private schools, despite the fact that just 7 per cent of children go to private schools.

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¡°I got a full maintenance grant to the LSE, my fees were paid and Lancashire County Council even paid the fees for my Bar finals,¡± said Ms Blair, whose mother Gale Howard worked in a fish and chip shop to support her family after her husband, the actor Tony Booth, left home when Cherie was eight.

¡°Three years after my sister went to train as a solicitor, they had stopped doing that ¨C I was working by that time, which is just as well because my mother couldn¡¯t have funded that,¡± she added.

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Speaking after Alan Milburn, the former Labour health secretary, quit as the government¡¯s social mobility tsar over Prime Minister Theresa May¡¯s?on this agenda, Ms Blair said that she often advises students to study law as an undergraduate to avoid the cost of converting.

¡°The expense is great, [so] whenever I go to schools and talk to [students] about law [I] encourage them to do law because at least they save [the] expense of a conversion course, which is a lot of money if you don¡¯t have parents who can pay for it,¡± she said of the two-year scheme, which can cost up to ?16,000 unless students win a training contract. The current system is set to be??for solicitors by a new ¡°super-exam¡± after two years¡¯ relevant work experience in 2020.

¡°Schools often discourage them to do it [this way and] instead [recommend] the conversion course, but schools don¡¯t take into account the cost of the conversion course,¡± she added.

However, Ms Blair, who has been chancellor of the Asian University for Women, in Bangladesh, since 2011, disagreed that the current?tuition?fees of ?9,250 a year would have deterred her from attending university, pointing out that ¡°someone from my background would have qualified for maintenance so that would have made a difference¡±.

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Asked if she regretted the Labour government¡¯s decision to?increase?tuition fees to ?3,000 in 2005, Ms Blair said ¡°the answer is not to go back to full grants [as it was when] only 5 per cent of students went to university¡±, adding that ¡°not very many were working-class children¡±.

¡°We have to work out how we afford tertiary education ¨C people who benefit from tertiary education should¡­shoulder that burden, rather than those who do not directly benefit from it,¡± said Ms Blair. ¡°Why should someone like my mother pay to educate the children of someone like me, as I am now? Because that is the issue.¡±

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com