SQE: Impact on Social Justice Lawyers and Legal Aid Pipeline

By Noella Gooden on Oct 8 2026 7:17am Solicitor Noella Gooden warns exams risk weakening the fragile pipeline into legal aid work Two of our law apprentices nearly left the law this year. Not over ability they were already doing the job and taking their own cases in a Law Centre housing team. Theyd failed SQE1 and couldnt afford another attempt. What kept them in was an anonymous donor, someone within the profession who heard what had happened and quietly covered the cost. Im grateful but I keep coming back to the same thought that qualification into social welfare law should not depend on the kindness of a stranger. I lead EDI and workforce development at the Law Centres Network, and part of my job is running a scheme that places solicitor apprentices in Law Centres people qualifying through the SQE while working and advising clients on housing, employment, discrimination, education, welfare benefits and/or immigration. These are exactly the lawyers the country is short of, training in exactly the places that need them. So, when the January 2026 results came in, I expected good news. Apprentices nationally tend to out -perform on the SQE. The SRA’s data for the July 2025 SQE1 first-time pass rate shows apprentices passing FLK1 and FLK2 combined at a rate of 51%, compared with 45% for non-apprentices. Instead, 6 out of 7 from my cohort didnt pass their first sitting of SQE 1. The group thats supposed to do better did worse. The reason isnt complicated. The exam doesnt test much of the work these apprentices actually do. SQE1 and SQE2 are built around subjects like contract, tort, land law, and business law. Some of these are sound foundations for a legal education, many of which are used by Law Centre solicitors in their day-to-day practice, but much of the assessment maps neatly onto commercial and general practice and barely touches the law my apprentices practise every day. Housing, welfare benefits, employment rights, discrimination, immigration, community care, public law: the everyday legal problems of people in crisis, and they scarcely feature. The effect is two parallel curricula. A trainee at a commercial or even a high street firm might spend the day assisting with an LLP agreement or learning conveyancing on the job, that is work that reinforces the exam and the evening revising subjects that reinforce the day. My apprentices spend the day on a homelessness review or a benefits appeal, then spend the evening revising bits of law they may never use. One group is running with the current; the other is swimming against it. Then theres everything around the exam. Commercial firms fund their trainees prep courses, pay maintenance grants while you study, or if you are working they build in study leave, and hand them the practice question banks that can make the difference between passing and failing. My apprentices study around a full caseload, with sadly no maintenance grant in sight. Fed up with their provider, my apprentices only got a proper question bank because QTLS generously opened theirs up to them for free the very resource commercial candidates get as standard. And when people cant afford to qualify at all, theres now a fund for that too: the Social Welfare Solicitors Qualification Fund, set up by the City of London Law Society, BARBRI and Young Legal Aid Lawyers, to cover prep and exam fees for people the system would otherwise be priced out. Im glad these things exist but look at what they are; a profession having to quietly pass round a hat to patch a route that doesnt work. You dont build a fund to solve a problem that isnt there, and you dont rely on a donor to keep two capable trainees in the profession unless something upstream has gone wrong. So, candidates are asked to gamble in the dark. The SRA promised, years ago, to publish pass-rate data broken down by training provider yet it still hasnt. No one should have to hand over thousands of pounds for a course with no way to compare what theyre buying a