GDL Providers

Any of them will be fine. It’s hard to differentiate them outside of how they assess you.

City will feel like you are at an actual university - BPP and UoL won’t have that same “campus” feel and all the student services you would get from a “proper” university.

None of them will directly help you get a TC though, and if you require a work permit it will be tricky unless you have a very certain in demand skill set

Just because City has a good reputation of getting more of its students into the Bar (because they have a BPTC course) doesn’t mean they are substandard when it comes to the solicitors profession.

Don’t fall for that marketing ploy by BPP or UoL - they don’t get you a TC and all they do is offer you a pretty useless course if you are not employed after you graduate. Please note employment and a TC are two very different things.

ACCA has no value at all to be honest. The EU Banking law won’t really help either - they aren’t the specialist skills that will be in demand at a trainee level.

The challenge you have is most firms who can support you with a work permit are already recruiting their 2021 intakes. You really need to be applying now to give yourself the best shot of securing a TC.

Typically it is only in demand language skills needed at trainee level (these are pretty much Arabic/Mandarin), but sometimes there will be firms who have a specific demand for junior lawyers from a certain jurisdiction as they have closer ties to that country. Some niche firms may want specific knowledge or experience in their particular area of law, but even then it isn’t necessary.

You can do both. GDL application shouldn’t be time consuming - it’s pretty straight forward and as long as you have the money you’ll practically be guaranteed to get on a course.

If the GDL LPC helps you in your home jurisdiction, or another country you’d be happy/able to work in, then there’s no harm in going forward for it now. But I just know too many international students get sucked into BPP and UoL’s marketing ploys of using statistics of how many of their students secure TCs (what they don’t tell you is they use the stats for those who already secured TCs prior to starting with the institution) or with the offer of being able to do a course with little to no value if you don’t get “any” job after graduating.