What To Know Before Starting an SQE Course
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The Course Doesn't Teach You the Law
Before I started my SQE course, I assumed it would work through each area of law from the beginning, the way a law degree module does. It doesn't. You learn the law in your own time, and the course itself teaches you how to apply it.
You also won't go through any of your undergraduate material at all, even though it's tested to exactly the same extent. You're expected to already know and have memorised everything you covered at undergraduate level or on your conversion course, on top of learning all the new areas for SQE. The course only teaches you how to apply the law — not the content itself. You have to cover that yourself.
Topics you're already expected to know
- Contract Law
- Criminal Law
- Tort Law
- Equity and Trusts
- Land Law
- Constitutional & Administrative Law
- The Legal System of England and Wales
New topics for SQE
- Wills and the Administration of Estates
- Business Law and Practice
- Criminal Practice
- Dispute Resolution
- Property Practice
- Solicitors' Accounts
- Legal Services
So you have to memorise all of this — potentially a lot of it from scratch, if, like me, you'd genuinely forgotten most of what you learned in the first year or two of your degree.
You have about four months to memorise 14 areas
From the start of an SQE course in September to the first SQE1 sitting in January, you've got roughly four months to have all 14 FLK areas memorised, understand how the exam questions are actually structured, and get enough practice in. That's four months to learn what's genuinely new from scratch, refresh everything you're expected to already know, memorise all of it, and drill exam-style questions on top.
Making notes from a textbook, page by page, takes far longer than you'd think
Going through each textbook topic by topic, writing your own notes on every page, and then trying to memorise all of it takes a genuinely enormous amount of time — time that four months doesn't give you much of, especially once you factor in practice questions on top of just knowing the law.
What I'd do differently
After starting the course and revision properly, I'd have worked out the actual syllabus first and written my notes against that, rather than working through a textbook and ending up with hundreds of notes that only loosely matched what the exam needed.
That second part is essentially what these workbooks end up doing. Between them, the FLK1 and FLK2 SQE Master Workbooks cover all 14 areas, broken down into questions mapped to the actual syllabus rather than a textbook's chapter order. Work through both, and you will have complete notes for the entire SQE1 syllabus all in one place.
If you're about to start an SQE course, or you've already started and your notes are getting away from you, I'd get hold of the workbooks as early as you can. The earlier you start, the more of those four months is actual memorising, rather than still working out what you're supposed to be memorising in the first place.