SQE1

How to Revise for SQE1 in Six Weeks: A Realistic Plan

Six weeks is tight but workable. Here's exactly how to spend the time without burning out or wasting it on the wrong things.

Six weeks feels like nothing until you treat it as a constraint rather than a crisis. Plenty of candidates pass SQE1 on six weeks of focused preparation. Plenty fail on six months of passive reading. The difference is almost never the amount of time. It's what you do with it.

Understand what SQE1 actually tests

Before you open a textbook, be clear on the format. SQE1 is split into two sittings: Functioning Legal Knowledge 1 (FLK1) and FLK2. Each is 180 single-best-answer multiple choice questions sat over roughly five hours. That's it. No essays, no problem questions, no discussion of competing academic views.

FLK1 covers Business Law and Practice, Dispute Resolution, Contract, Tort, and the Legal System of England and Wales. FLK2 covers Property Practice, Wills and Intestacy, Tax and Revenue Law, Equity and Trusts, and Criminal Law and Practice.

The Solicitors Qualifying Examination is set and marked by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. The pass mark is not published in advance; it's set by standard-setting after each sitting. You're not competing against other candidates, but you are being judged against a benchmark of what a day-one solicitor should know. That framing matters. You don't need to know every edge case. You need to recognise correct legal principles quickly and apply them to short fact patterns.

Week one: audit, don't just start reading

The worst thing you can do in week one is open a revision guide and start at page one. You'll spend three days on contract formation, feel productive, and then run out of time for criminal procedure. Instead, spend the first two days doing a diagnostic.

Most preparation providers release free sample questions or practice papers. Sit a timed block of 60 questions across mixed topics. Score yourself honestly. What you're looking for isn't a pass mark, you're looking for a map. Which subjects are already sitting at 65%+? Which are at 40% or below? That tells you where six weeks of effort will move the needle most.

A rough guide on allocation: if you're already solid on contract (say, you studied it deeply at LLB), don't spend equal time on it as on a topic you've barely touched. The SQE rewards breadth of competence more than depth in one area.

Build your schedule on topics, not textbook chapters

Once you've done your diagnostic, map your six weeks across the fourteen topic areas. A workable structure looks like this:

• Weeks 1 and 2: FLK1 subjects (the ones you're weakest on get more days)
• Weeks 3 and 4: FLK2 subjects (same principle)
• Week 5: Mixed practice, cross-topic questions, filling gaps
• Week 6: Full mock papers, light review of persistent weak spots, exam logistics

That sounds simple because it is. The complication is discipline. When you hit equity and trusts and find it confusing, the temptation is to keep reading more notes. Resist it. After about ninety minutes of new content, the return on passive reading drops sharply. Switch to questions.

Active recall is not optional

This is the single most important methodological point in this post. Reading notes is not revision. Re-reading highlighted text is not revision. Writing out neat summaries in coloured pens is not revision. All of those feel productive because they're comfortable. None of them reliably transfer knowledge into the retrieval pathways you need in an exam room.

Active recall means testing yourself before you feel ready. Flash cards where you read the front and force yourself to produce the answer before flipping. Practice questions before you feel confident in the topic. Writing down everything you can remember about, say, the tort of negligence before you look at your notes, then checking what you missed.

The research on this is not new or contested. The testing effect is well established in cognitive psychology. For SQE1 specifically, it also happens to mirror the actual exam format. Every time you answer a practice question, you're both learning and practicing the skill the exam requires.

How to handle the big subjects

Tort

Tort questions in FLK1 are heavily weighted toward negligence. You need to know the three-stage Caparo test (duty, breach, damage) fluently, and you need to be comfortable with the distinction between established duty situations and novel ones. [Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562](https://www.getcaselaw.com/case-library/7c984837-f0b3-4afc-a73f-3ec96f6e4756) is the foundational authority on the neighbour principle and will appear as background knowledge even if it's not directly cited in a question.

For the SQE specifically, focus on: the standard of breach (the Blyth v Birmingham Waterworks reasonable person test), causation including the but for test and Fairchild exceptions, and pure economic loss. Questions about occupiers' liability under the Occupiers' Liability Acts 1957 and 1984 appear regularly and are genuinely rule-based, which makes them good targets for marks.

Nuisance and the rule in Rylands v Fletcher come up less frequently but you should know the basics. For [Rylands v Fletcher [1868] UKHL 1](https://www.getcaselaw.com/case-library/65ecd889-4647-4539-89bf-pill-065ec68f274b), know the Blackburn J formulation (non-natural use of land, accumulation, escape causing damage) and the defences. The SRA has tested whether liability is strict and whether the defendant can rely on the act of a stranger.

Contract

Contract is high volume and high frequency. Offer and acceptance, consideration, terms, exclusion clauses under UCTA 1977, breach, and remedies. The SQE loves questions where an offer has lapsed or been revoked before acceptance, or where a counter-offer has destroyed the original offer. Know Hyde v Wrench [1840]. Know postal acceptance. Know that silence cannot constitute acceptance.

For exclusion clauses, the structure to apply is always: incorporation first (signature, notice, course of dealing), then construction, then the statutory controls. UCTA 1977 does not apply to consumer contracts post-2015, that's CRA 2015 territory. Get that distinction right.

Criminal Law and Practice

Criminal is split between substantive law (FLK2) and procedure. The procedure questions often trip candidates up because they require knowledge of specific rules: magistrates' court jurisdiction, either-way offences, mode of trial, bail under the Bail Act 1976, and disclosure obligations.

For substantive criminal law, the actus reus and mens rea framework is non-negotiable. Murder (unlawful killing, under the Queen's or King's Peace, with malice aforethought meaning intention to kill or cause GBH) versus voluntary manslaughter via the partial defences in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 (loss of control, diminished responsibility) are standard exam territory. Theft under the Theft Act 1968 and the five elements (appropriation, property, belonging to another, dishonesty under the Ivey v Genting Casinos objective test, intention to permanently deprive) appear almost every sitting.

Equity and Trusts

This is where candidates often lose marks they shouldn't. The topic is conceptually demanding but the SQE tests it in a fairly predictable way. You need to know: the three certainties (Knight v Knight 1840: certainty of intention, subject matter, and objects), the formality requirements under s.53 LPA 1925, and the difference between express, resulting, and constructive trusts.

Breach of fiduciary duty is a common question frame. Know the no-profit rule and the no-conflict rule. Know Keech v Sandford [1726] for the strictness of the no-profit rule applied to a trustee. Proprietary estoppel (assurance, reliance, detriment) appears in both Equity and Property questions.

For deeper reading on the equity topics, the Equity and Trusts topic hub is a good place to work through the cases systematically.

Business Law and Practice

This covers company law, partnership, taxation basics, and professional conduct. The professional conduct questions are arguably the most predictable in the whole exam because they map directly onto the SRA Standards and Regulations. Read the SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors and the principles. Questions about conflicts of interest, confidentiality, and duties to the court are standard and the answers are largely rule-based.

For company law: the distinction between private and public companies, the duties of directors under the Companies Act 2006 (ss.171-177, especially the duty to promote the success of the company under s.172 and the duty to avoid conflicts under s.175), and the basics of share capital and loan capital.

The question practice problem

Most candidates don't do enough questions. They tell themselves they need to understand the material better first. This is backwards. You understand the material better by doing questions and being wrong about it.

A realistic target for six weeks is around 1,500 to 2,000 questions across both sittings. That sounds like a lot. It works out to roughly 50 to 65 questions per day, which is one to two hours of timed practice. That is achievable alongside your content review sessions.

When you get a question wrong, don't just read the explanation and move on. Write down, briefly, why you got it wrong. Was it a gap in knowledge (you didn't know the rule)? A misread of the facts? A confusion between two similar rules? Each of those needs a different fix. Knowledge gaps go back to notes. Misreads need you to slow down on the fact pattern. Confused rules need a side-by-side comparison.

Practise with real SQE1 questions as part of your daily routine. Getting used to the question style matters as much as knowing the law.

Week five and six: don't drop content review entirely

Some candidates go into full mock-only mode in weeks five and six and stop reviewing their weak topics. This is a mistake if you still have genuine gaps. The rule is: if you're scoring below 60% on a topic in mixed practice, keep a content review session in your schedule. If you're above 65%, questions are more valuable than more reading.

For full mock papers, replicate exam conditions as closely as you can. 180 questions in one sitting, no phone, timed strictly. Your brain needs to experience that level of sustained concentration before the real thing. Most candidates find the first full mock exhausting in a way they didn't predict. Better to discover that now.

A note on the SRA materials

The SRA publishes the FLK1 and FLK2 subject matter outlines. These are not glamorous documents but they're essential. Every topic on the outline is fair game. Topics not on the outline will not appear. Print them out and check off what you've covered. It takes twenty minutes and it stops you wasting time studying things the exam won't ask about.

Sleep, pacing, and the last 48 hours

This is not motivational filler. In the final 48 hours before each sitting, no new topics. Review your flash cards on things you already know, glance at your error log from recent practice, and sleep. The research on sleep and memory consolidation is clear: a full night's sleep before an exam is worth more than four hours of late-night cramming. You are not going to learn property law at 1am the night before FLK2.

On the day, read every question stem carefully. The SQE loves fact patterns where one detail changes the answer entirely. A client who instructs their solicitor is different from one who asks for advice. A company in pre-incorporation stage is different from one already registered. These are not tricks. They're tests of whether you can apply law to facts rather than just recall it.