When the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) launched its latest SQE1 consultation, it did so with an unusual admission. The regulator acknowledged that candidates and educators have told it the “breadth and depth of the FLK is too wide” and that the core areas covered are “too numerous”. Yet the response now on the table is not a slimming-down of the assessment. The proposals amount to a tightly scoped set of technical adjustments: a few targeted deletions from the tax syllabus, a handful of additions to three practice areas, and a firm restatement of the regulator’s belief that a wide examination is essential to protecting the public. The consultation thereby forces a question the SRA itself has not conclusively answered: how much knowledge should a newly qualified solicitor be required to demonstrate, and at what point does comprehensiveness become an obstacle to competence rather than a guarantee of it?
Inside the SQE1 Consultation: Targeted Tax Removals and New Additions
At the centre of the SRA’s SQE1 consultation are proposed changes to the Functioning Legal Knowledge (FLK) framework, which sets out the legal principles and rules candidates are expected to know and apply across the exam’s multiple-choice assessments. The most consequential proposals are removals. The SRA wants to strike a series of anti-avoidance provisions relating to income tax, capital gains tax, corporation tax and inheritance tax from the FLK. These provisions sit at the technical end of taxation law, and their deletion would lighten one of the densest corners of the syllabus — a change that will be read as a response to the longstanding complaint that SQE1 expects too much of generalist candidates.
Balancing the cuts are proposed additions to property law, wills and probate, and criminal law. The rationale is practical: these are areas that newly qualified solicitors routinely encounter in their early years of practice, regardless of whether they ultimately specialise in them. The message the SRA is sending is that the exam should test what a solicitor is most likely to need, not the furthest technical corners of every discipline.
What is the SQE1 Functioning Legal Knowledge (FLK) framework?
The Functioning Legal Knowledge (FLK) framework is the SRA’s formal specification of the legal principles and rules that SQE1 candidates must know and apply in the exam’s multiple-choice assessments. It is organised around the core practice areas that the regulator considers essential for safe and competent practice as a newly qualified solicitor. The consultation asks whether the current scope of the FLK is too broad, too narrow or about right, and whether the proposed additions and removals reflect the knowledge an NQ solicitor genuinely requires.
What the consultation does not contemplate is structural surgery. There is no proposal to remove entire practice areas from the FLK, no suggestion that the number of core subjects should be significantly reduced, and no plan to introduce the wholesale rebalancing that some educators and candidates have demanded. The SRA has positioned the exercise as a refinement — an adjustment at the margins of a syllabus it continues to regard as fundamentally sound.
Why the SRA Is Resisting Both Expansion and Contraction
The consultation documents show a regulator caught between two opposing forms of advocacy. One camp argues that the exam tries to cover far too much, imposing unsustainable preparation burdens and contributing to poor results. The other calls for the FLK to incorporate additional subjects — most prominently family law and social welfare law — on the grounds that many solicitors encounter these areas early in their careers, particularly in high-street and legal aid practice. Both positions have genuine merit, and the SRA’s reasoning for declining both is revealing.
Why did the SRA reject calls to add family law and social welfare law to SQE1?
The SRA concluded that expanding the syllabus would increase costs and result in longer assessments, cutting against the accessibility objectives that underpinned the creation of the SQE. It also argued that removing or reducing existing practice areas would risk undermining its responsibility to ensure that newly qualified solicitors can practise competently across the full range of reserved legal activities. The regulator therefore kept the exam’s broad scope intact, presenting the changes as refinements rather than reform.
The cost calculus is not trivial. The SQE was designed, in part, as a more flexible and accessible qualification route than the Legal Practice Course that preceded it, and a significantly longer assessment would raise preparation costs, increase demands on test centres, and add to the financial burden borne by candidates who can least afford it. The SRA’s caution on expansion reflects a genuine tension between the desire for curricular completeness and the practical economics of professional assessment.
The argument against contraction is, in the SRA’s estimation, weightier still. The regulator is responsible for certifying that everyone admitted as a solicitor in England and Wales is competent to undertake the reserved legal activities — the core functions that only solicitors and certain other authorised persons may lawfully carry out. If the exam no longer tested a particular area, the SRA would struggle to justify certifying competence in it. The breadth of the FLK, viewed from this angle, is not curricular accident; it is the direct expression of the regulator’s statutory duty of public protection.
The Results Behind the Reform: A 42% Pass Rate and a Shorter Exam
The consultation unfolds against a backdrop of deteriorating results. The most recent SQE1 sitting recorded a pass rate of 42%, down sharply from 53% in January. The drop intensified public and professional scrutiny of the assessment, prompting questions about whether its difficulty reflects a defensible standard of competence or an accumulation of pressure — too many subjects, too many questions, too little time.
The SRA has already acted on one part of that diagnosis. It recently confirmed plans to reduce the number of SQE1 questions from 360 to 340, acknowledging complaints that the assessment felt rushed and pressurised. The change is modest — a reduction of roughly five and a half per cent — but it is symbolically significant: it marks the first formal concession that the format of the exam, not merely its content, had created unnecessary difficulty for candidates.
Looked at together, the two interventions form a coherent, if cautious, response. The question-count reduction addresses the time pressure candidates experienced in the exam hall. The syllabus consultation addresses the volume of material they must master in preparation. What neither measure does is confront the deeper question at the heart of the debate: whether a single multiple-choice assessment can reasonably test the full range of knowledge expected of a solicitor at the point of qualification.
Beyond the Syllabus: AI, Ethics and Supervision in the SRA’s Sights
The consultation extends well beyond the FLK. It also carries proposals aimed at strengthening expectations around artificial intelligence, professional ethics and supervision — areas that speak to how solicitors will work in the coming decade, rather than simply what they know on exam day.
The artificial intelligence proposals are particularly timely. Generative AI tools are already reshaping legal research, document drafting and client communication, and the SRA’s willingness to address the topic in a qualification consultation signals that professional competence will increasingly be judged in terms of judgment, oversight and accountability rather than raw knowledge recall. Solicitors who deploy AI will be expected to understand both its capabilities and its limitations, and to remain responsible for the work their tools produce.
The ethics and supervision proposals follow a similar trajectory. The SRA has indicated it wants to clarify the responsibilities of solicitors who supervise trainees and paralegals, and to sharpen the professional conduct standards that apply when technology is used in the delivery of legal services. These elements risk being overshadowed by the syllabus debate, but they may ultimately have a more lasting effect on the culture of legal practice than any single change to the exam’s subject list.
What the SQE1 Consultation Asks — and Who Should Answer
For all its technical detail, the consultation comes down to a small number of direct questions. Respondents are invited to say whether the FLK is too broad, too narrow or about right. They are asked whether the proposed additions to property law, wills and probate, and criminal law, alongside the intended removals from the tax provisions, reflect the knowledge actually required of a newly qualified solicitor. And they are given an opportunity to identify where the boundaries of the syllabus should sit.
The phrasing is deliberate — and strategically useful to the SRA. By asking the profession to rule on the fundamental breadth of the FLK, the regulator creates a mechanism for validating whichever direction it ultimately takes. If respondents endorse the current scope, the SRA can defend the status quo as professionally mandated. If they declare the syllabus too broad, the regulator gains a mandate for the more aggressive pruning it has so far declined to undertake. The consultation functions, in other words, as both a genuine invitation for feedback and a way of managing expectations around a deeply contested assessment.
The audience with a stake in the outcome is wide. Candidates preparing for SQE1 will feel the effects directly, as will the education providers that design preparatory courses and the law firms that sponsor candidates through qualification. But the consultation also matters to the wider profession, because the standards embedded in the SQE define the baseline of competence for every solicitor admitted through this route. That baseline shapes how clients experience legal services, how employers evaluate junior lawyers, and how the profession sustains its reputation for technical proficiency.
This is a pivotal moment for the SQE project. The exam was introduced to replace older qualification routes and to create a modern, transparent and flexible path into the profession, yet its early years have been marked by persistent complaints about workload, cost and pressure. Falling pass rates have compounded the anxiety, particularly among candidates from non-traditional backgrounds for whom the SQE was intended to open doors. The decision to consult is itself a recognition that the exam’s legitimacy depends on the confidence of those who sit it, as much as on the rigour of those who design it.
The SRA has made its position clear: it will not shrink the exam by default, and it will not expand it without cost justification. Instead, it has handed the profession a choice. The response to the consultation will determine whether the coming years bring further refinement of the SQE1 model or a more fundamental reconsideration of what a solicitor must know. The era in which the exam’s scope could be settled without sustained public interrogation is over. The pressure that produced a 42% pass rate, a truncated question count and a formal consultation on the syllabus is not going to dissipate on its own — and neither, the SRA appears to have concluded, is the argument for keeping a wide exam at the heart of qualification.
