Preparing the accountancy student

The accountancy profession has a long history of reliance on the private tutor. Until recent times, “education” for the prospective accountant has been substantially in the hands of the correspondence college which dominated the studies of articled clerks of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. A solicitor, H. Foulks Lynch, founded the firm of that name as long ago as 1884. The only serious but later rival in that field was the British College of Accountancy, which ceased to exist a few years ago. Even in 1962, the Robbins Committee on Higher Education was given evidence to show that four out of every five students of the Institute relied wholly or in part on correspondence tuition. While students of other accountancy bodies in England and Wales were not dominated to the same extent by correspondence methods, the numbers making use of oral tuition, whether in the public or private sectors, were but a small minority of aspiring accountants.