How to prepare for SQE2: a plan built around the 16 assessments

SQE2 is 16 assessments — four oral, twelve written — across six skills and five practice areas, and your final mark weights skills and application of law equally.

That last fact should decide how you prepare, and usually does not. Most SQE2 preparation is knowledge revision with some skills practice bolted on. The assessment is half skills, assessed by a person watching you do them.

Start from the grid, not the syllabus

Every station is marked against named criteria, published in advance, each graded A to F. You can read the exact criteria for the station you are practising and mark yourself against them. Almost nobody does.

Worse, the SRA publishes Performance Indicators — what competent and non-competent work looks like on every criterion, the documents its own markers use. They are free, and they are the closest thing to being told the answer. See what the SRA publishes.

Full detail on grades, weighting and who marks what is on how SQE2 is marked.

The six skills

| Skill | Time | Guide | | --- | --- | --- | | Client interview and attendance note | 10 min prep · 25 min interview · 25 min note | Guide | | Advocacy | 45 min prep · 15 min submissions | Guide | | Case and matter analysis | 60 min | Guide | | Legal research | 60 min | Guide | | Legal writing | 30 min | Guide | | Legal drafting | 45 min | Guide |

The five practice areas are Criminal Litigation, Dispute Resolution, Property Practice, Wills and the Administration of Estates, and Business Law and Practice. Examinable content is a subset of SQE1's Functioning Legal Knowledge — and Legal Systems, Solicitors' Accounts and most of Legal Services are not examined in SQE2 at all.

An order that works

1. Learn the shape before the law. You cannot practise a station you cannot describe. An hour spent on the specification and the criteria saves ten later.

2. Practise out loud, early, with another person. The two oral stations are marked on things you cannot observe in yourself: pace, whether you took the court to the document, whether the client trusted you. Three of the SRA's own four suggested uses of its samples involve a peer or a camera.

3. Write to the clock, by hand where it is by hand. The attendance note is handwritten in 25 minutes. Legal writing is 30 minutes. These are not generous, and the first time you discover that should not be on the day.

4. Mark yourself against the criteria, not your memory of the law. After each attempt, score every criterion A to F using the Performance Indicators. The gap between what you thought and what the grid says is where the marks are.

5. Leave the law revision proportionate. You are expected to apply fundamental principles, not to know detail a newly qualified solicitor would look up — the specification says as much. Where detail is needed, it is supplied in the materials.

What preparation usually gets wrong

Treating ethics as a topic. Ethics is pervasive across SQE2 and never flagged. In most stations it is a criterion of its own, scored separately from the law. A candidate who analyses impeccably and walks past the conduct point loses a criterion, every time.

Polishing written answers. Formatting is not taken into consideration by markers. Paragraph spacing, bullets and font earn nothing. Minor spelling is not penalised either — the criterion is clear, precise, concise and acceptable language.

Practising orals silently. Reading submissions in your head trains none of what is marked.

Preparing for the wrong clock. Advocacy is 45 minutes of preparation and 15 minutes of submissions. Guidance written from the superseded 2020 specification gives only the 45, and candidates who believe it prepare three times the material they can deliver.

Ignoring the practice platform. The written assessments are sat in Pearson VUE's closed environment — no internet, no browser spell check, a highlighter you only get there. Practising in a word processor gives you tools you will not have.

Where the knowledge still matters

Half your mark is application of law, and ethics sits inside that half. The point is not that knowledge is unimportant — it is that knowledge alone is assessed at SQE1. SQE2 asks whether you can use it in front of a client, a judge, or a partner waiting on a note, within the time given.