Professional education and skills: liberalising higher education for the professions in the United Kingdom

Higher education for the professions of accountancy, law and medicine faces multi-faceted roles as it attempts to be simultaneously an education, with the additional incorporation of training aspects, and a preparation for later professional study and work. As this article shows, these three professions are facing a knowledge explosion and it is becoming increasingly difficult for new graduates to have covered, even if only briefly, all possible aspects of the knowledge-based curriculum. Additionally, this article shows that the skills possessed by new graduates in these disciplines have been criticised. Thus, there have been calls to broaden the curriculum within higher education in these professional disciplines to cover hitherto under-explored areas. This article aims to compare trends in the higher education of three professional disciplines in order to identify areas of commonality. The article begins by briefly discussing higher education and its application in professional contexts. Three specific higher education contexts are considered – accounting, medicine and law – in order to illuminate the nature and prpose of higher education in each of these fields. Following identification and discussion of common themes, the liberalising of curricula in these professions will be considered.