Two things are true at once. The regulator is reassuring everyone the exam works. It is also running a full five year review to find out. Here is what that actually means if you are sitting the SQE in the next couple of years.

If you have felt confused about where the SQE actually stands right now, you are not imagining it. The regulator is putting out two messages at the same time, and they sit in real tension with each other.

On one hand, the SRA's Chief Executive has said these reports should reassure employers and candidates that the SQE is a robust and rigorous assessment, and its Independent Reviewer has praised the assessment provider Kaplan for a culture constantly looking to improve. On the other hand, the SRA is currently in the middle of a five year evaluation of the entire system, one substantial enough to have pulled in focus groups with over 80 legal stakeholders back in March.

Both of those things can be genuinely true. A review does not necessarily mean a system is failing. But if you are planning your route to qualification over the next couple of years, you need to understand what is actually being looked at, what has already changed, and what to do while the bigger questions remain open.

Start with what the SRA wants you to hear. Its most recent reporting draws on data from eight SQE1 and twelve SQE2 exams sat since the assessment launched, covering roughly 30,000 candidates across 50 countries. Within that dataset, some genuinely positive patterns emerge. Solicitor apprentices have consistently outperformed other candidate groups, and candidates with declared disabilities have performed at least as well as everyone else, which is a meaningful data point given how much scrutiny the SQE's accessibility received in its early years.

The SRA has also made real, tangible improvements. It has expanded its bank of sample questions to 220, it committed to launching a new tool this year to help candidates compare training providers by cost, duration and delivery method, and it runs an annual review of the Functioning Legal Knowledge content to keep the syllabus current with changes in the law.

Here is where the SRA's own admissions start to complicate its own message.

When the SQE launched, the regulator committed to publishing pass rate data broken down by training provider, so candidates could make informed choices about where to study. It still has not done this. Its own explanation is that it does not yet have confidence in the quality of the data it has collected, and that publishing it now would risk misleading candidates. That is a strikingly honest admission, and also a genuinely concerning one. Years into the exam's life, the regulator still cannot confidently tell you whether one preparation course actually produces better results than another.

Then there are the pass rates themselves. Across the exam's history, first time SQE1 pass rates have ranged as widely as 46% to 60%, depending on the sitting. The most recent sitting, January 2026, landed at 58% for first timers and 53% overall. That is not a small range. It means your odds of passing can shift meaningfully depending on nothing more than which sitting you happen to book.

And underneath all of this sits the annual fee increase, which took effect again this September, taking the combined SQE1 and SQE2 cost close to £5,100. Candidates are paying more, into a system whose own regulator admits it cannot yet reliably tell them which preparation route works best.

This is the part that matters most for anyone timing their own qualification. The SRA's five year evaluation of the SQE, including a full review of the Functioning Legal Knowledge, has already produced tangible output. Following focus groups with more than 80 legal stakeholders in March, the SRA published updated assessment specifications, with more changes made to the FLK than in any previous annual review. Those changes take effect for assessments from September 2026 onwards, meaning the first sitting affected will be SQE2 in October.

This tells you two things. First, the review is not just a talking exercise. It is already producing real changes to what gets tested and how. Second, if you are sitting exams either side of that September cut off, you need to check which specification actually applies to your sitting rather than assuming continuity.

The wider five year evaluation is a bigger undertaking than the annual FLK review, and its full findings have not yet been published. Whether it leads to more structural change to the exam itself, rather than just the content within it, is genuinely still an open question.

Do not wait for certainty that may not arrive for years. The SRA's own data offers a few genuinely useful, practical takeaways regardless of how the wider review concludes.

If you are choosing between preparation routes, the published data on apprentices is worth paying attention to, since a structured, work integrated route to the SQE has consistently outperformed other paths. The data also suggests that candidates who had already completed the LPC did not perform as well as others when sitting the SQE afterwards, a useful data point if you are weighing up whether to convert an existing qualification pathway. And because the FLK content itself is reviewed and updated every year, whatever preparation materials you use need to be current for your specific sitting, not simply the most recent edition you can find.

Beyond the exam itself, this is also strong material for interviews. Being able to speak accurately about the tension between the SRA's public reassurance and its own ongoing review shows a level of engagement with the profession's regulatory structure that most candidates, still repeating the same "SQE replaced the LPC" line, will not have.

The SQE is not secretly falling apart, and it is not beyond criticism either. It is a five year old assessment system still being actively reviewed by its own regulator, with real changes already happening as a result. The smart move is not to wait anxiously for a verdict that may be years away. It is to understand exactly what is under review, what has already changed, and to make your own decisions about preparation and timing based on the data that already exists rather than the reassurance alone.

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