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In this paper, the historical and contextual factors that resulted in a change from a postgraduate LLB to an undergraduate LLB, as the single qualification for lawyers in South Africa in 1997 as part of a national transformation agenda, are reviewed. It is timely to consider whether the motivating reasons for introducing a four-year degree, to enhance representivity within the legal profession and to reduce the cost of obtaining a legal education, have been met. Systemic and structural features of post-apartheid South Africa, which reflect the legacy of unequal educational provision, a vast socioeconomic divide, and a divided legal profession, continue to hamper attempts to redress past imbalances. A failing school system, ongoing poverty, and the underpreparedness of increasing numbers of students gaining access to higher education have produced data that reveals high university drop-out rates, particularly for African students, and distressingly low levels of student success at tertiary institutions. Dissatisfaction amongst stakeholders regarding the quality of law graduates has added to the current impasse as to how legal education can most effectively be improved. The establishment of a new Ministry of Higher Education and the undertaking of a research project on the effectiveness of the law curriculum by the Council on Higher Education both promise some possibility of flexibility and change in the future.

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Background: From 2020, the Law faculty has decided to discontinue the five-year Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP) stream within the Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree for a variety of reasons, including students' perceptions of stigma, the poor throughput rate of this stream and the identified need to extend academic support to more students in the mainstream class.Objectives: This article argues that we need to gain insight into the struggles experienced by novice writers on the ECP to inform the nature of support that will need to be provided to LLB students going forward. We thus sought to explore the nature of the challenges experienced by two sets of first-year LLB ECP students with acquiring legal writing practices, namely students from high school and postgraduate students with degrees from other faculties. Method:Two semi-structured interviews on students' perceptions of their challenges experienced with legal writing were conducted with 12 participants.Results: Students' struggles with legal writing could be traced to difficulties with engaging appropriately with legal concepts and sources, reading effectively and accommodating the discipline's valuing of conciseness in presenting arguments. We also show how students' English additional language status and prior degrees inform these struggles. Conclusion:The article shows the value of looking to ECP students' challenges with literacy practices (legal writing) in their first year to inform support for all first-year LLB students.

Criticisms in the media and in the law