How long it takes alongside a job
Full-time candidates typically prepare for SQE1 over three to four months at 30 to 40 hours a week. With a full-time job, the same ground takes six to nine months at 10 to 15 hours a week — longer if you are coming to law for the first time.
Stretching the same total over more weeks is not a neutral change. Material learnt in month one has to survive until month eight, which is why a working candidate’s plan has to be built around recurring practice rather than a single pass through the syllabus. That is the whole design problem, and everything below follows from it.
A week that works
Roughly 12 hours, arranged so that a lost evening costs you one item rather than the week:
| When | How long | What |
|---|---|---|
| Weekday mornings, five days | 45 minutes | One set of questions plus whatever review is due |
| Two weekday evenings | 90 minutes | New material, ending in questions on it |
| One weekend block | 3 hours | Mixed set across everything covered, then the review |
The five short morning sets are the load-bearing part. They are what keeps month one alive in month eight, and they are small enough to survive a deadline, a delayed train or a bad night. The long weekend block is where new ground gets covered; if it has to go, the week still holds.
Using fragments properly
A twenty-minute gap is useless for reading a chapter on registered land and perfectly good for ten questions. Fragments are where working candidates make up the difference — but only for the right work:
- Good in fragments:question sets, flashcards, reviewing yesterday’s mistakes, re-reading one rule card.
- Bad in fragments: first exposure to a new topic, anything requiring a diagram, and timed mocks.
The corollary is that your material has to be usable on a phone, in ten-minute pieces, without setup. If preparing to study takes five minutes, a twenty-minute gap has already lost a quarter of itself.
Finding time for full mocks
A full session is two and a half hours, and you need several of them. Working candidates routinely postpone mocks until there is no time left to act on the results, which defeats the purpose.
- Diarise them months ahead, on weekend mornings, as fixed appointments.
- Sit them at the time of day your real session falls, not late at night.
- Budget the review as a second appointment. A mock without a review costs three hours and teaches you a number.
- If a full session is genuinely impossible, sit half at a time, timed — worse than the real thing, far better than nothing.
Surviving a bad month
Work will eat a fortnight at some point. Plans die there — not from the lost time, but from the feeling of being behind, which turns into avoidance.
- Keep the daily set at all costs, even if it shrinks to five questions. Continuity is worth more than volume.
- Cut coverage, not practice. Falling behind the syllabus is recoverable; letting six months of material go cold is not.
- Re-plan from today, not from the original plan. Count the weeks you actually have left and redistribute. A plan you have mourned is a plan you have abandoned.
- Build in one empty week per two months from the start, so the bad fortnight lands on slack rather than on content.
Choosing the sitting
SQE1 runs in January and July, which for a working candidate means your revision peak lands either over Christmas or in the summer. Both have hazards: December is short on evenings, and July follows a June that is usually busy at work.
Count backwards from the sitting to today, subtract the weeks you know are already gone — holidays, a family event, a quarter-end — and be honest about what is left. If the honest number is short, the next sitting is six months away and an attempt is not something to spend lightly: the rules on that are in the resit guide.
The mechanics of a plan like this — a daily list you do not have to design, mistakes that come back on their own, and a mock scheduled when it is due — are what our dashboard exists to do. Start with a free warm-up set, or read the full revision plan guide first.