Free SQE Resources and How to Use SRA Sample Questions Properly

Most candidates do the same thing in their first fortnight of SQE revision. They find the SRA's free sample questions, open the PDF on a Tuesday evening with a cup of tea, work through the lot in about ninety minutes, get roughly two-thirds right, feel quietly reassured — and then never touch them again. Four months later, sitting a full-length mock and haemorrhaging time on Trusts, they'd give a great deal to have those questions back unseen.

That's the core problem with free SQE material. It isn't that there's too little of it. It's that the small amount which genuinely mirrors the real assessment is finite, non-renewable, and almost always spent at the worst possible moment — before you know enough to learn anything from it.

So let's be practical. What's actually free and worth your time, what the SRA's own material can and can't do for you, and how to sequence it so that it earns its keep.

What the SRA gives you for free — and what it's genuinely for

The SRA publishes a set of resources at sqe.sra.org.uk that every candidate should read before spending a penny anywhere else. The exact contents get refreshed periodically, so check the site rather than trusting a blog post (including this one) as to the current line-up. Broadly, though, you'll find:

• Sample single-best-answer questions for SQE1, covering both FLK1 and FLK2 subjects, with answers and short explanations of why the correct option is correct.
• The Assessment Specification — the document that tells you precisely which topics are examinable and, crucially, at what level of depth.
• Assessment information and candidate guidance, covering booking, reasonable adjustments, exam-day conduct and what happens on results day.
• SQE2 sample tasks and assessment criteria, which matter enormously if you want to understand how the five skills are actually marked.
• Statistical reports on past sittings, including performance by attempt number and by candidate background.

Here's the thing people underrate. The single most valuable free document the SRA publishes is not the sample questions. It's the Assessment Specification.

The Assessment Specification is the syllabus, and hardly anyone reads it properly

SQE1 tests thirteen functioning legal knowledge subjects — seven in FLK1 (Business Law and Practice; Dispute Resolution; Contract; Tort; Legal System of England and Wales; Constitutional and Administrative Law and EU Law; Legal Services) and six in FLK2 (Property Practice; Wills and the Administration of Estates; Solicitors Accounts; Land Law; Trusts; Criminal Law and Practice). That's a lot of ground.

The Specification tells you, subject by subject, exactly which sub-topics are in scope. It also makes clear that you are being assessed as a competent newly qualified solicitor would need to know the law — applied, on your feet, without a library. It expressly does not require you to recite case names or statutory section numbers unless knowing them is genuinely part of practising competently.

Read that last point twice. I have watched candidates build 400-card decks of case names for Tort. Meanwhile they can't confidently apply the test for remoteness to a fact pattern involving a subcontractor and a burst pipe. The exam will punish the second gap and shrug at the first.

Print the Specification. Annotate it. Use it as the master checklist against which you tick off revision. When you build a topic list from a textbook's contents page instead, you inevitably import material the SRA doesn't test and miss things it does.

How to actually use the official sample questions

The sample questions are calibration tools, not a question bank. There simply aren't enough of them to be a training volume — you need thousands of reps to build MCQ fluency, and the SRA has never pretended otherwise. What the samples do give you, that nothing else can, is an authoritative answer to the question: what does a real one of these look like?

Which means you should be miserly with them.

Rule one: don't touch them in week one

Attempting sample questions before you've covered the underlying content teaches you nothing except that you don't know the content yet, which you already knew. Worse, you burn the novelty. Once you've seen a question and its explanation, you can never again use it to test whether you'd have got it right cold.

Hold them back until you've completed a first pass of at least a few subjects.

Rule two: split the set into thirds

A sequencing that works well:

1. First third — diagnostic, after your first content pass. Do them untimed. The goal is to see the shape of an SRA question: the length of the stem, the way the client's problem is framed, how the distractors are built.
2. Second third — mid-revision, under timing. Give yourself 1 minute 43 seconds per question, which is roughly the real ratio (180 questions in 2 hours 33 minutes, per assessment). Notice where your reading speed collapses.
3. Final third — late, as a sanity check. Two or three weeks out, under exam conditions, alongside your own practice material. If your accuracy on unseen SRA-authored questions is markedly worse than on your usual practice questions, that's a signal worth acting on.

Rule three: dissect the distractors, not just the answer

This is where most of the value lives, and it's the step nearly everyone skips.

When you get a question right, you learn almost nothing. When you get one wrong — or right for the wrong reason — you have four or five options in front of you, each of which was written by an examiner to be attractive to a candidate holding a specific misconception. Work out what each misconception is.

A properly built single-best-answer question typically contains: one option that is legally correct; one that would be correct on slightly different facts; one that states the right rule but reaches the wrong conclusion; one that reflects a common student-level oversimplification; and sometimes one that's simply wrong but sounds professional. Name the trap in each case. Write it in your own words.

The candidates who improve fastest aren't the ones who do the most questions. They're the ones who can explain, out loud, why each wrong option was put there.

A worked example of the dissection habit

Take a Contract-style stem of the sort the SRA favours. A supplier emails a buyer offering 500 units at £12 each, saying the offer is open until Friday. On Wednesday the buyer emails back asking whether the supplier could do 700 units at £11.50. The supplier doesn't reply. On Thursday the buyer emails: "Ignore my last message — I accept your original offer of 500 at £12." The supplier says there's no contract. Advise the buyer.

The options will include something like: (a) no contract, because the buyer's Wednesday email was a counter-offer which destroyed the original offer; (b) a contract exists, because the Wednesday email was a mere request for information; (c) no contract, because the supplier's silence amounted to rejection; (d) a contract exists, because the offer was stated to be open until Friday and was therefore irrevocable.

Option (a) is the trap for anyone who has memorised the counter-offer principle but hasn't learned to distinguish a genuine counter-offer from an inquiry. Option (c) is nonsense dressed up in confident language — silence does not operate that way. Option (d) is the classic firm-offer error: a promise to keep an offer open isn't binding without consideration, and in any event the point here isn't revocation.

The correct answer turns on characterising the Wednesday email as an inquiry rather than a rejection — it's tentative, exploratory, and doesn't purport to introduce new terms as a condition of agreement. Now, the value of that exercise is not the answer. It's that you have now catalogued three distinct misconceptions, any one of which will resurface in a different guise on exam day. Written into your wrong-answer notes, that's worth more than twenty questions you got right on autopilot.

The rest of the genuinely useful free material

Beyond the SRA, there's a decent amount of free content that's worth using — provided you're clear about what each type is good for.

Primary legislation and case law

Legislation.gov.uk gives you the statutes for nothing. The Supreme Court publishes its own judgments. BAILII carries an enormous archive. For SQE purposes you rarely need to read a full judgment — but when you're stuck on why a rule works the way it does, twenty minutes with the actual words of a section can unstick you faster than three re-reads of a summary. The Land Registration Act, the Insolvency Act, the Trustee Act: skim the relevant sections and the structure of the subject starts to make sense.

Do not, however, turn this into a research project. The SQE1 examiner is not asking for your view on a line of authority. They're asking what you'd tell a client on Tuesday morning.

Professional and regulatory material

The SRA Standards and Regulations sit free on sra.org.uk, as do the SRA Accounts Rules. Legal Services — ethics and conduct — is examined pervasively across FLK1 and FLK2, meaning an ethics point can be embedded in a Property question or a Business Law question without warning. The Codes of Conduct are short. Read them properly rather than relying on someone's summary of them. Same for the Accounts Rules: they're brief, they're free, and they are the entire basis of a FLK2 subject that many candidates find disproportionately winnable.

SRA guidance on QWE and character and suitability

Qualifying work experience trips people up more often than it should, and every answer you need is published. Two years of full-time equivalent QWE, in up to four organisations, confirmed by a solicitor or by the organisation's COLP, providing exposure to the competences in the Statement of Solicitor Competence. Paralegal work counts. Placements can count. Volunteering at a law centre can count.

The detail — who can sign off, what records you need to keep, how to register it — is set out on sra.org.uk, and it changes in emphasis from time to time. Read it at the source rather than taking a forum's word for it. Same for character and suitability: if you have anything in your history you're uncertain about, the SRA's own guidance and its early-assessment route are the only sensible starting point.

Published statistics

The SRA publishes reports after each SQE1 and SQE2 sitting, broken down in some detail. These are free, and they're more informative than the headline number everyone quotes. Look at the breakdown by attempt, and by whether candidates had completed a preparation course. Look at the relationship between FLK1 and FLK2 performance. Resist the urge to memorise a percentage and build an identity around it — pass rates move between sittings, and the current figures are on sqe.sra.org.uk.

Where free material runs out

Let me be straightforward about this, because there's a certain amount of romanticism online about qualifying entirely on free resources.

You can absolutely learn the law for free. Statutes, judgments, the Specification, the regulatory rulebook — it's all there. What you cannot get for free, in anything like sufficient volume, is calibrated practice: thousands of single-best-answer questions, pitched at the right level, tagged by sub-topic, with explanations that tell you why the distractors were tempting.

And volume matters here in a way it doesn't for other exams. Two assessments of 180 questions each. Thirteen subjects. The skill being tested is partly legal knowledge and partly a peculiar sort of reading discipline — extracting the operative facts from a 120-word stem, discarding the decorative detail, and committing to the best of five plausible options in under two minutes. That's a motor skill. Motor skills need reps.

What to look for when you do pay for something

Rather than comparing brands, evaluate any paid resource against criteria:

• Does the question style match the SRA samples? Compare side by side. If a provider's questions are shorter, more academic, or test recall of case names, they're training you for a different exam.
• Is there enough volume to avoid memorising the bank? If you can exhaust it in a month, you'll end up recognising questions rather than reasoning through them.
• Are questions tagged to sub-topic? "I'm weak at Land Law" is useless. "I'm at 48% on easements and 81% on co-ownership" is a revision plan.
• Do the explanations address every option? Explanations that only justify the correct answer are half-finished.
• Can you sit realistic timed mocks? Practising in tens tells you nothing about how your accuracy behaves in the ninetieth minute.

This is the gap the Ant Law SQE Question Bank was built for — 14,000-plus single-best-answer questions mapped to the FLK1 and FLK2 syllabus, tagged down to sub-topic level, with a practice engine that pushes your weak areas and previously wrong answers back at you rather than letting you re-do what you already know. There's an AI tutor attached to each question if you want to interrogate a point further, which is genuinely handy at eleven at night when you can't work out why option C is wrong and there's nobody to ask. If you'd like a second opinion on question style before committing, CELE SQE is another option worth a look.

A sensible order of operations

Pulling it together, here's how I'd sequence the free material against everything else:

1. Week one. Download and read the Assessment Specification for both FLK1 and FLK2. Build your topic checklist from it. Read the assessment information so you understand format, timing and booking mechanics. Do not open the sample questions.
2. Content phase. Learn the law, subject by subject, ticking off the Specification as you go. Use legislation.gov.uk and the SRA Standards and Regulations as primary sources when something doesn't make sense. Start doing large volumes of practice questions from a proper bank as soon as you finish each topic — not at the end.
3. First checkpoint. After a first pass of, say, four or five subjects, do the first third of the SRA samples untimed. Dissect every distractor.
4. Consolidation phase. Timed practice sets. Wrong-answer review as a daily habit rather than an occasional purge. Second third of the SRA samples, under timing, somewhere in the middle.
5. Final six weeks. Full-length timed mocks. Final third of the SRA samples in exam conditions. Re-read the Codes of Conduct and the Accounts Rules — they're short, high-yield, and easy to let slide.

One last thing about pacing, because it's the failure mode I see most. Candidates who lose FLK1 usually don't lose it on knowledge. They lose it by spending three minutes on question 14 — a nasty Business Law point about directors' duties — and then rushing the last thirty questions of the session. The SRA's samples won't fix that on their own. Full-length timed sittings will.

Start here today: open the Assessment Specification on sqe.sra.org.uk, pick the one FLK subject you've been avoiding, and write out its sub-topics as a checklist. Then go and do forty timed questions on it. If you need the questions, the Ant Law SQE Question Bank at antlaw.ai has them tagged and waiting — on iOS, Android or in your browser — and you can be practising in about the time it takes the kettle to boil.