What are the continuing professional development requirements for immigration lawyers?

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Immigration and asylum law in particular is a complex and fast moving area, and it is crucial that lawyers stay up to date to best serve their clients. It is also a regulatory requirement that must be met annually.

There is no longer a minimum hours requirement for continuous professional development training and training can be undertaken with any training provider or even by informal methods including self study.

The three regimes for solicitors, barristers and Immigration Advice Authority advisors are different but they all operate in broadly the same way. Lawyers are expected to:

Reflect and identify their own training needs
Plan for how to meet those needs
Address those needs
Record and evaluate how they met their training needs
Submit an annual declaration to the regulator saying that they have complied with the scheme

We have set out more details and linked to useful resources for each of the three schemes below. We have also identified below where Free Movement can help lawyers to meet these requirements.

Solicitors

The scheme for solicitors is referred to as the “continuing competence requirements”. The Solicitors Regulation Authority sets out the requirements as follows:

Reflect – regularly consider the quality of your practice, in all aspects of your role. You should reflect on all areas of your practice and not just on the quality of your technical legal knowledge, for example working with others including clients. You should also consider your ethical and professional obligations, including awareness and application of any warning notices and guidance we have issued that are relevant to your work.
Identify – through reflection, identify your learning and development needs.
Plan and address – regularly update a plan on how you will address your learning and development needs.
Record – keep an up-to-date record of your learning and development activity. You can use our template to help you do this. If you are using another approach, please make sure you include how you identified your learning and development needs.
Evaluate – think about the effectiveness of your learning and development.

The Law Society gives the following examples of learning activities:

working towards professional qualifications
taking part in courses and accreditations
work shadowing
listening to or watching audio-visual material
doing research

All of the above activities count towards meeting the continuous competence requirement, and there is no minimum amount of time that must be spent on this.

The SRA also provides learning and development templates. Using these is not mandatory, but will often be the easiest and most sensible option to evidence that the requirements have been met.

When renewing their practising certificates annually, solicitors must make a declaration that they:

have up to date understanding of the legal, ethical and regulatory obligations relevant to their role and
have reflected and addressed any identified learning and development needs and
are competent to perform their role.

Evidence of how competence has been maintained is not required, but the SRA may ask for this to be provided.

In short, there is no limit on the means by which a solicitor can address their training needs as long as it is effective for the individual concerned and the solicitor complies with the other requirements of the scheme by planning, recording and evaluating.

Immigration Advice Authority advisers

The Immigration Advice Authority has guidance on their continuous professional development scheme, including templates for logging the learning and development plan and record. It does not prescribe how advisers should do their continuous professional development training, but it does expect advisers to maintain a learning and development record documenting how they keep themselves up to date.

Methods of learning and development specifically mentioned by the Immigration Advice Authority include:

Classroom training
Online training
In-house training
Conference or meeting
Webinar
Review of gov.uk and Home Office website materials
Reading material and blogs from reputable sources
Supervision, coaching and teaching

The Immigration Advice Authority will review and inspect plans and records during audits, as part of any investigation and by “dip sampling”.

Barristers

The continuing professional development scheme for barristers is detailed at part 4, section C of the Bar Standards Board handbook. The New Practitioner Programme applies to those in their first three years of practice and requires a minimum of 45 hours of continuing professional development during that time (see rQ132).

After that the applicable scheme is the Established Practitioner Programme which is similar to the schemes for solicitors and Immigration Advice Authority advisers. These barristers must (rQ134):

prepare a written CPD Plan setting out the barrister’s learning objectives and the types of CPD activities they propose to undertake during the calendar year
keep a written record of the CPD activities the barrister has undertaken in the calendar year
keep a written record in the CPD Plan for each calendar year of:
the barrister’s reflection on the CPD they have undertaken;
any variation in the barrister’s planned CPD activities; and
the barrister’s assessment of their future learning objectives.
retain a record of the CPD Plan and completed CPD activities for three years.
submit to the Bar Standards Board an annual declaration of completion of CPD in the form specified by the BSB

The guidance gives a non-exhaustive list of continuing professional development activities:

Taking part in formal face-to-face training courses, including university courses
Online courses
Podcasts
Attending conferences
Taking part in seminars or webinars
Reading or research
Authorship and editing of published works of a professional nature. This could include exam papers; substantial consultation responses; law reform proposals; professional updating e-zines / blogs
Presenting seminars, lectures and workshops
Teaching a relevant legal course eg LLBs, LLMs, the GDL, BPTC, LPC or Diplomas in Law

The Bar Council also provides templates that people can use to meet the requirements of the Established Practitioners Programme or New Practitioner Programme.

The Bar Standards Board says in its detailed guidance that it will monitor CPD through random spot checking.

Meeting your continuing competence requirements through Free Movement

We help immigration practitioners address their training needs and record and evaluate whether those needs have been met. You can:

Read the main blog. We quickly post information about important new developments such as changes to the immigration rules or new cases. These updates go on the main blog and in our daily and weekly email newsletters.

However, it is easy to overlook emails, there are limits on the number of blog posts that non-members can access and this method of keeping up to date leaves no real record, so relying on these emails alone are probably not good enough to satisfy formal CPD requirements. Free Movement membership grants access to more formalised options.
Attend one of our live webinars or workshops. Thousands of people have attended our webinars since we launched the programme in December 2023. With a wide variety of topics covered, there is something for all practitioners and webinars can be purchased after the event for anyone who has missed out. Confirmation of attendance (as opposed to confirmation of booking) is not automatically provided but can be on request.
Take online training courses. If you’re a Free Movement member, our online training courses are a great way to meet your competence/professional development requirements. We have 41 subject-specific courses amounting to nearly 100 hours of training content. In addition we offer Immigration Advice Authority (previously OISC) training courses at both Level 1 and Level 2. These are ideal for those working towards accreditation.

Every course in our training library includes a short quiz at the end to test your understanding. Once you pass, you can download a certificate to demonstrate that you’ve successfully completed the course. This makes it easy to keep a record of your learning activities.

We know that tracking training hours and digging out certificates can be a total nightmare so we’ve made it as convenient as possible. As long as you’re logged into your Free Movement account, you can view all your completed courses in one place. Just hover over the ‘Training’ tab in the top menu and click on ‘Members’ courses’. In the top right-hand corner of that page, you’ll see an option to view your completed courses and download your certificates. You can also see the courses you’ve started but not yet finished. The certificate has the date that you completed the course and you will also get an email when you complete the course which you may want to keep in a dedicated training folder in your emails.
Listen to monthly update podcasts. We put out a podcast at the start of every month which summarises the developments of the previous month. We select the more important posts from a given month and then talk through the developments and their significance in practice. From the feedback we’ve received, apparently they make an excellent soundtrack to your commute or to keep you company while cooking dinner.

You can use these creatively: podcasts would be a good basis for further discussion at a team meeting, for example. To help document that you have listened and learned from the podcast, Free Movement members can access a short, ten-question quiz for each podcast (here, under “updates”) and download a certificate as a record. A record that you have completed the course will also be in your online member’s account as described above.
Join the forum. The Free Movement forum allows members to exchange ideas and practical problems and solutions. Especially for sole practitioners or solicitors in small teams, this can be an invaluable way of seeking feedback and high quality peer-to-peer advice. You are likely to get it, too – in the past week alone, there were over 25 separate topics under active discussion.
Write for us. A guest post on Free Movement takes your engagement with new developments to the next level. There can be few better demonstrations that you are across a freshly published judgment or particular issue that you have encountered in practice than being able to explain it in accessible terms to other practitioners and the wider public. Record keeping takes care of itself: an article under your byline will always be accessible on the site, and you can save a html or pdf copy of the post into your own files. Ideas can be submitted to the Editor, but do read our contributor guidelines first.