The Bill Law archive

Bill Law (1935-2017) was the Founding Fellow of NICEC, having joined Founding Director Tony Watts when NICEC was established in 1975 as a joint activity of CRAC and Hatfield Polytechnic.

Bill Law: career journey and principal interests

Bill was born and raised in London. After completing a degree in divinity his first job was as an RE teacher in a school in West London. He later became the school’s counsellor and took on responsibility for careers. In 1973 he moved into higher education, as a lecturer in education at the University of Reading where he led the training course for school counsellors. Two years later, in 1975, he moved to Hatfield Polytechnic as a senior lecturer and joined NICEC.

Bill remained at Hatfield for the next 17 years until, in 1992, the Polytechnic became incorporated as the University of Hertfordshire and decided to end its relationship with NICEC. Bill became a self-employed consultant and trainer and continued as a NICEC Fellow for the next 18 years, only stepping down in 2010 when CRAC ceased to fund NICEC and NICEC transitioned from a research & development organisation to the current learned society model. But this did not mean Bill stopped working: he continued to write and post material on his website up to a few weeks before he died.

Bill was first and foremost a teacher. His main interest was careers work in schools and, in particular, careers education and curriculum. He was, however, also interested in guidance, especially narrative approaches to career counselling.

He had little time for policy matters: his focus was always on theory and practice. He was an innovative thinker and users of this archive will find it saturated with ideas. His writings constantly challenge the reader to think about what we do and why we do it.

Key writings and concepts

The DOTS model

One of Bill’s most enduring contributions, and one for which he is probably most frequently cited, is the ‘DOTS model’ for determining the content of a careers programme, developed with Tony Watts as an outcome of one of the first NICEC projects. Bill argued that careers education should help young people develop their capabilities in four broad areas: decision learning; opportunity awareness; transition learning; self-awareness. The model stands the test of time and still underpins many of the frameworks of learning outcomes for careers education and guidance used across the world today.

Law, B. & Watts, A.G. (1977). Schools, Careers and Community. London: Church Information Office.

Career Learning Theory

Very early on Bill felt that the DOTS model was too limited for planning a careers programme and more attention should be given to how individuals develop their career management skills over time. He introduced the concept of progression into career learning and proposed a new career learning theory, central to which was the idea that in each of the four areas of the DOTS model people should be helped to move through the four stages of sensing, shifting, focussing and understanding.

Law, B. (1996). A career learning theory. In Watts, A.G., Law, B., Killeen, J., Kidd, J.M. & Hawthorn, R. (eds). Rethinking Careers Education and Guidance. London: Routledge.

Community Interaction Theory

At a time when there was a lot of debate between psychological and sociological perspectives of how people make career choices, Bill sought some middle ground and became interested in how individuals’ interactions with other people in their communities influenced and shaped their choices. He argued that careers programmes should enable students to meet people that they would otherwise be unlikely to encounter. Such thinking is directly relevant to contemporary debates about the role of work experience in education about careers.

Law, B. (1981). Community Interaction: a ‘mid-range’ focus for theories of career development in young adults. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 9 (2): 142-158

Life role relevance in the curriculum

Colleagues have commented that Bill’s writings were often ahead of their time. One such example is the open-learning resources pack, Careers Work, that he wrote for the then Department of Education and Science (DES) in 1990 as an early attempt to establish some form of training for careers teachers in England. Much of the material in the pack would be directly relevant to providers of the current national careers leader training programme.

Possibly the best example comes from the 2000s. During one of the reviews of the national curriculum in England Bill had been invited to join a consultation meeting. What he had to say caught the attention of one of the senior officers from the then Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) and Bill was invited to submit his ideas in writing. The paper, entitled Life-role relevance in the curriculum (LiRRiC), set out proposals for moving from a knowledge-based curriculum to one focussed on developing skills for life. This proved to be a step too far for the politicians of the day and 20 years later we still have a heavily knowledge-based curriculum while former Education Secretaries call for a more skills-based approach.

See items BL70 - BL74 in the archive

For further details about Bill and his immense contribution to careers work see the special issue of the NICEC journal dedicated to him Vol. 39 No. 1 (2017): Special issue dedicated to Bill Law | Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling

Please feel free to download whatever you require, and use it widely, with due attribution to Bill Law.