What SQE1 is
SQE1 is the first of the two assessments in the Solicitors Qualifying Examination, the route to qualifying as a solicitor of England and Wales. It tests functioning legal knowledge: not whether you can recite a rule, but whether you can apply the rule a competent newly qualified solicitor would apply to the problem in front of a client.
It is made up of two assessments, FLK1 and FLK2. Both are multiple choice, both are closed book, and both have to be passed. FLK1 leans towards the business and contentious side of practice; FLK2 towards property, private client and criminal practice. The two papers are described subject by subject in the guides to what FLK1 covers and what FLK2 covers.
Ethics and professional conduct are not a separate paper. They are examined pervasively, which in practice means a conduct point can be folded into a question about a commercial lease or a client account just as easily as into a question about the SRA Principles.
The structure: two FLKs, four sessions
Each FLK assessment is sat in two sessions of two hours and 33 minutes, so SQE1 as a whole is four sessions. From the January 2027 sitting each FLK carries 170 questions — 85 in each session — after the SRA reduced the count from 180 in response to candidates reporting that the paper felt rushed. The session length did not change, so the reduction buys you a few extra seconds per question.
The other change from January 2027 matters more than the arithmetic: the subjects are split between the two sessions and published in advance, so you know which areas of law can appear in which session. Within a session the questions are still randomised, and ethics can still surface anywhere. What changes is that you are no longer switching between every subject on the specification in a single sitting. The detail is in what changes in SQE1 from January 2027.
Sittings run twice a year, in January and July, at Pearson VUE test centres — dates, fees and bookingcovers the practical side. Booking windows, fees and centre availability change from sitting to sitting, and the only source worth trusting for those is the SRA’s own SQE website.
What a question looks like
Every question in SQE1 is a single best answer question. You get a short factual scenario — usually a client, a transaction or a dispute — followed by a question and five options, labelled A to E. One option is the best answer. The others are not necessarily nonsense: several are usually true statements of law that do not answer the question asked, or answers that would be right on slightly different facts.
That design is deliberate, and it is why passive revision disappoints people. Reading a textbook chapter on the discharge of contracts builds recognition; the exam asks you to choose between five plausible endings to a story. The skill of narrowing five plausible options to one is its own thing, and it is trainable — see single best answer technique.
How it is marked
Each question is worth one mark. There is no negative marking, so an unanswered question is simply a mark you did not take. Your raw score is then converted to a scaled score out of 500, and the pass standard is always 300. Scaling exists because papers differ slightly in difficulty from one sitting to the next; it keeps the standard, not the raw percentage, constant.
The practical consequence is that the raw percentage needed to reach 300 moves between sittings — recent sittings have sat in the region of 56 to 60 per cent. FLK1 and FLK2 are scaled and passed separately. Results also place you in a quintile, one of five bands against everyone who sat with you, which is the single most useful line on the results page if you are deciding whether a resit needs a new approach or more of the same. There is more on all of this in the SQE1 pass mark explained.
Attempts, resits and the six-year window
You get three attempts at FLK1 and three at FLK2, counted separately, within a six-year window that starts on the first day of your first SQE assessment. Passing one paper and failing the other costs you one attempt at the paper you failed, not both. You cannot resit a paper you have passed to improve the mark.
If you use all three attempts at a paper without passing, you have to wait for the six-year window to close before starting the SQE again, and passes already banked do not carry over. Those are the rules worth knowing before you book a sitting you are not ready for.
What this means for preparation
Three things follow from the format, and they shape everything we build:
- Breadth beats depth. Around 340 questions have to cover thirteen subject areas. The exam cannot afford obscurity; it asks the everyday rules, repeatedly, from different angles.
- Recall has to be automatic. Closed book, roughly 108 seconds per question, and no time to reason from first principles. What you half-remember, you will get wrong under time pressure.
- Practice is the revision, not the test of it. The most reliable preparation is answering questions, reading why the other four options fail, and returning to the ones you got wrong until the reason sticks.
That last point is worth taking literally. Candidates who work through several thousand questions with real explanations behind them, rather than re-reading notes, tend to arrive on the day knowing exactly which subjects they can be asked anything about — and which two or three still need the week before. Building a revision plan covers how to arrange that across the months you have.