Early Bird Scholarship 2025
The opportunity
The Early Bird Scholarship offers:
- a mentoring scheme with our trainees for support and career guidance for three years while you study law at university;
- a week of in-person work experience at the firm at the end of your first year of university;
- tailored workshops and skills sessions throughout the three year scholarship; and
- financial assistance of £7,500 paid in equal instalments over your time at university.
As an Early Bird Scholar, you will automatically be awarded a place on our Flying Start Programme in your first year, and then mentored on how to apply for our other early career opportunities, such as our vacation schemes. We hope that as your knowledge and understanding of the legal world and Bird & Bird develops, you will choose to apply for a training contract with us.
Applying to us
Applications open: Midday on 10 April 2025
Deadline: Midday on 31 July 2025
We operate rolling recruitment, which means we screen applications as they are received, rather than after our deadline. Therefore, we encourage you to apply as early as possible.
To be able to apply for a place on our Early Bird Scholarship, you must fulfil all of the below eligibility criteria:
- you must be in Year 13;
- you must be attending a state (non-fee paying) school or sixth form college in the UK;
- you must be the first generation in your immediate family to attend university;
- you must be applying to study Law or a Law-related degree at a UK university (part-time distant learning courses will be considered if circumstances warrant); and
- you should have achieved at least 5 A grades or 5 Level 7 and above in GCSE, including English and Maths, as well as expected to achieve at least AAB or equivalent at A-Level.
You must also fulfil one or more of the below criteria:
- you have been or are eligible for free school meals;
- you attend a sixth form college or school where more than 25% of pupils are eligible for free school meals;
- you spent time in local authority care; and/or
- you are, or have you been, a parent or a registered carer.
We understand that you may not have received the grades you hoped for due to extenuating or mitigating circumstances. Please detail any relevant information in your application for us to take into consideration. We also use a Contextual Recruitment System (CRS) to enable us to recruit people from different backgrounds and help us understand your achievements in the context in which they were gained.
Please note that in our application process, we collaborate with Vantage which facilitates connections with legal employers such as Bird & Bird. Owned by Rare Recruitment, Vantage functions as a comprehensive database of candidate profiles, enhancing the efficiency of the application process. Rare Recruitment initially acts as the data controller for your personal information until you submit your application to us, after which Bird & Bird assumes responsibility as the data controller. We strongly recommend reviewing Rare Recruitment's Privacy Policy, available here. For further details on how Vantage processes your personal data, including access to their Privacy Policy, please refer to the information provided below.
Application deadline:
Thursday 31 July 2025 at 11:00 (UTC)
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