Sophie’s Story

I grew up in Leeds and attended The Morley Academy, then Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College for my A-Levels.

As a child, I was passionate, opinionated, and always had a strong sense of justice. People would tell me I’d make a good lawyer one day, which I now think was a polite way of saying I was argumentative! However, I was drawn to law as a career. I felt I could make a difference and help people.

I have always been quite academic, loved learning, and enjoyed school. But there were barriers. We were a single-parent household. My mum was on benefits, and we had little income. Home life could be tumultuous but for the most part, it was happy.

I didn’t have a Wi-Fi connection at home until I was 18, so completing homework assignments was sometimes impossible. I had to rely on absorbing everything in class without additional resources to support my studying.

The wealth of online knowledge was never really accessible to me

Nowadays, most take internet access for granted. My lack of access didn’t just affect my studies; it completely limited my ability to learn about my further education options. My peers could go home and research careers, schools, courses and attend insight events. They could make educated and informed decisions for themselves. I couldn’t, nor did I have peers with experience to advise me.

My mum always encouraged me to go to university, but she couldn’t tell me how to do it as she hadn’t done it herself. Of course, I had access to careers support and teachers, but there might be 30 teachers supporting 1000 students, so they weren’t immediately accessible and support wasn’t available at the level I needed.

When I got a part time job at 16, most of what I earned went on paying for things that most of my friends’ parents still bought for them, such as bus fares, toiletries, clothes, phone bills, stationery and a laptop. I was so grateful for this small financial freedom but it still didn’t cover everything, like the cost of attending university open days. I had no transport, so I could never explore further education options like my friends could.

Knowing my mum couldn’t financially support me made the thought of university increasingly terrifying. I would have had to support myself entirely, with no safety net.

I had heard about maintenance grants and loans but how could I fund a move to live away, or buy things like bedding, pots and pans, transport to get there and back? I didn’t know how I would manage all that. Even if I lived at home while studying, the resources and transport costs felt overwhelming.

The financial burden I would take on by going to university forced me to question my options: I estimated I’d have around £60,000 of debt at the end of my degree, and then I’d have to self-fund the SQE/LPC to qualify as a solicitor. Some say that a student loan is essentially a tax you don’t have to repay if you don’t earn enough, but I didn’t know that. My mum was always debt averse and I didn’t have access to the resources to learn about debt.

In my second year of sixth form, panicking that I might be priced out of my dream career, I turned to my law tutor. She told me about legal apprenticeships, took the time to send me lots of information and offered to help me with my applications. If it wasn’t for her, I would never have known about apprenticeships: at college, they pushed university as the way to succeed and when I was in high school, apprenticeships were supposedly only for those who had failed GCSEs or wanted to go into a trade. They weren’t widely known as a route to becoming a solicitor. I will always be so grateful to her for helping me.

My law tutor showed me the Gordons website and I remember seeing that they were the first law firm to offer legal apprenticeships. I felt I would get good support there, applied and got an interview.

When I spoke about my background at the interview, the interviewers told me that people from similar circumstances to mine had set up the apprenticeship to help those who might not have the opportunity to go to university. It gave me a sense of belonging and I felt like I had found a firm that cared.

Now, I am a passionate advocate for apprenticeships. They give access to a career and a qualification without student debt, and you are paid while you learn. The apprenticeship has allowed me to support my mum financially and give myself the independence and freedom I never had as a child.

It’s vital that apprenticeships continue to drive social mobility

When I started four years ago, apprenticeships weren’t as popular they are now, but more people view them as a viable, if not better, option to access a legal career. There has, therefore, been a considerable rise in applicants from all backgrounds. However, I feel strongly that apprenticeships should primarily be a route for young people to escape the poverty trap, and they should not be crowded out by applicants who are better supported by a professional network or affluence.

I would love to evolve our social mobility work here at Gordons, perhaps introducing a mentoring scheme to give aspiring young people without professional connections the support they need.