What the SRA actually requires
To qualify as a solicitor through the SQE you need four things:
- A degree in any subject, or an equivalent qualification or experience. History, engineering and nursing all count.
- SQE1, the two functioning legal knowledge assessments, described in SQE1 explained.
- SQE2, which assesses practical legal skills.
- Two years of qualifying work experience, plus the SRA’s character and suitability requirements.
Notice what is not on that list: a law degree, and a conversion course. Under the old LPC route a non-law graduate had to take the GDL before anything else. Under the SQE, nothing stands between you and the assessment except being ready for it.
Is a conversion course worth it?
It depends on what you are buying. A PGDL gives you structure, deadlines, teaching and a cohort — which for some people is the difference between finishing and not. It also costs several thousand pounds and a year, and it is not aligned question by question with the SQE1 specification, because it was designed for a different route.
A reasonable way to decide:
- Take one if you have never studied law, you learn better with teaching and deadlines, and the cost is manageable — particularly if a future employer is funding it.
- Skip it if you are self-directed, you have studied something analytically demanding before, and you would rather spend the money on a year of preparation aimed precisely at the exam.
Either way, the SQE1 preparation itself is a separate piece of work. A conversion course is not a substitute for practising several thousand single best answer questions.
What you are actually missing
Less than most non-law candidates fear, and it is concentrated in a predictable place. SQE1’s thirteen subject areas split into two kinds:
- Foundational subjects — contract, tort, land law, trusts, criminal liability, the legal system. A law graduate met these at university. This is your gap, and it is a real one.
- Practice subjects — business law and practice, dispute resolution, property practice, wills and administration, criminal practice, solicitors accounts, legal services. These are barely covered in most law degrees, so everyone starts them from roughly the same place.
Which means a law graduate’s head start is real but partial. In FLK2, where property practice, wills and solicitors accounts carry a large share of the questions, it is smaller than you would guess.
How to start from scratch
- Start with the foundations, in this order: contract, then tort, then criminal liability, then land law, then trusts. Each is self-contained enough to learn in a few weeks, and land before trusts saves repetition.
- Answer questions from week one. Not after you feel ready — the point of a question is to show you what you do not know, and that is most useful early.
- Then the practice subjects, pairing each with its foundation: land law into property practice, criminal liability into criminal practice, trusts near wills and estates.
- Then mixed practice and mocks for the final third, exactly as everyone else does.
Expect the vocabulary to slow you down for the first month. Legal writing is dense before it is familiar, and that is a phase rather than a verdict. The subject-by-subject maps in FLK1 subjects and FLK2 subjects are a reasonable syllabus to work through.
Work experience alongside
Qualifying work experience does not have to come from a training contract with one firm: it can be gathered across up to four organisations, including paralegal roles, in-house placements and law clinics, and it can be done before, during or after the SQE assessments. Each stretch has to be signed off by a solicitor or a compliance officer.
For a career changer that is the most useful part of the reform, because it means the two years can start without anyone first awarding you a place. Many candidates work as a paralegal while preparing for SQE1 — which is demanding, but it is also the arrangement preparing while working full-time was written for.