The Working Committee on Legal Education Sector Reforms has recommended that the Council for Legal Education (CLE) considers increasing the examination fees of the Advocates Training Programme (ATP) to ensure it is sustainable.

In its report, the committee, which was chaired by Christine Agimba (inset), said that the pressing financial issue affecting the CLE following the reduction of its budgetary allocation of Sh202.7 million has crippled the entity’s performance of its core mandate of administering the ATP exams.

The ATP is an 18-month programme administered by CLE and involves written, oral, and project examinations. CLE conducts two examination series per year, in November and April. At the moment, a regular student pays Sh5000 per paper, translating to Sh45,000 for nine papers.

The recommendations of the committee came after CLE said that the current fee structure cannot sustain the administration of examinations, since the institution no longer receives financial support from the National Treasury and thus proposed that a review of the fees should be upwards.

“The Committee recommends the reinstatement of CLE’s budget for the financial year 2024/2025 amounting to Sh202.750 million to enable it discharge its core mandate. The Committee recommends that the CLE considers increasing the examination fees,” the report read.

The committee that was set up by the Attorney General Dorcas Oduor has also recommended the harmonisation of resit, re-mark fees and regular examination fees administered CLE after concerns by law students that the fees are high.

They further recommended that the CLE anchors the examination fees in the proposed regulation of the existing legal framework for legal education.

The recommendations of the committee come after students were of the view that the ATP examination fee, especially the re-mark and re-sit fees, was high.

According to the report, an A student pays Sh45,000 for the nine examination papers as CLE charges Sh15,000 for a remark and Sh10,000 for a resit per paper.

“Comparatively, Deans of Law Schools in their engagement with the Committee indicated that most universities charge a thousand shillings (Sh1,000) for re-sits and do not charge re-marks,” the report noted.