Do you wish you could be part of that world?

To have to apply to 300 odd legal shops for one kind soul to respond,
To have entirely non-legal sifters ruling you out because you don’t fit their cookie cutters
To be selected on the basis that your pedigree sniffs nice if you are Oxbridge, and
To be reliant on hollow tests like Watson Glaser whose predictive validity for legal practice is suspect.

– what’s skill in all of this?

SQE is the correct measure of whether you have it in you to call yourself a solicitor.

The petition launched by trainees, now with close to 1,000 signatures, does not demand a dilution of standards. It highlights structural flaws: a 41% failure rate in SQE1, high and rising costs, no access to feedback, and a growing mental health toll on candidates. These are not the complaints of the entitled! They are the experiences of aspiring professionals navigating a high-stakes system often without institutional or financial support.

The situation faced by one trainee, who lost her training contract and was asked to repay a five-figure sum after failing the SQE, is a sobering reminder of the risks borne almost entirely by students. That firms feel emboldened to enforce clawback clauses underlines the need for safeguards, not scorn.

Ms Braverman qualified via a very different route- one with clear support, a structured path, and the resources of elite institutions. Today’s candidates often work full-time, self-fund their preparation, and sit exams that many argue test memory over meaningful legal reasoning.

Rigour in qualification is essential. However, rigour without fairness, transparency, or support does not uphold standards, it erodes them. The legal profession should champion resilience, yes, but also accessibility, proportionality, and *responsibility*.

Calls for reform are not about making the route easy. They are about making it just. Get with the times, and emphasise the importance of accuracy and integrity instead of refusing accountability.

Why do you think securing a TC is down to luck? I’m not sure luck has much to do with it .

As a retired Legal Executive ( admittedly not a lawyer) , I find it incredibly that those who have started this do not perceived what the general public might think of their nievety and sense of entitled. This “general public” from which solicitor’s client’s come from.
There was never a more depressing scenario than when a lawyer let’s down a client from bad practice ( howsoever that bad practice manifests itself). The thought that future solicitors are ringing their hands and crying “not fair” is depressing situation and this petition might well give , the said general public, less faith in the legal profession.

Challenge, difficult, hard, or any other such synonyms are not dirty words. Some things are hard, and you have to do them to get what you want. Having said that, there are elements of the SQE that are unnecessary; such as the advocacy component. These nits should be addressed. You don’t want an assessment to be hard just for the sake of it.

The SQE gives candidates that were not lucky enough to secure a TC, an opportunity to qualify, so long as they are willing to face the challenge and work hard.

Look around your cohort. 40% of them are never going to have a hope. So the pass rate ratio is not that bad.

Not lawyering, maybe, but it is 99% of being a junior solicitor.

Not in the minds of the wokeists pushing the SQE. They have a problem with long complex sentences because they were alleged to be discriminatory against minorities. Not that solicitors have any need to understand complex English, of course.

You want the opposite, make it easy? Do you think people that succeed in life do so by making the path easier for them?

It doesn’t work like that unfortunately for those that wish it did.

That said, if you can’t push through 1 to 2 years of intense study for the SQE, you probably won’t handle the demands of a long term legal career anyway.

As someone who recently sat the SQE, the exam felt more like a penalty than an assessment – it can leave you questioning why you chose to pursue a career in law in the first place. The format, the way it’s assessed, and the calculation of the pass mark all come across as unnecessarily harsh. While the SQE was introduced with the stated goal of widening access to the legal profession, in reality, it seems to have had the opposite effect – narrowing it.

The assessment does not reflect the qualities or skills required to be a competent lawyer. It doesn’t test your understanding of the law in any meaningful way, and many of the questions feel deliberately misleading rather than designed to evaluate practical legal ability. They seem intended to catch candidates out, rather than assess their potential to succeed in practice.

It’s difficult to ignore the impression that the SQE was designed, at least in part, to reduce the number of qualifying solicitors in response to a saturated job market. If that is the aim, there must be a more constructive and fair way to address it. The extreme stress caused by this exam, particularly given its questionable relevance, is simply not justifiable.

Speaking personally, I felt my own SQE 1 exam went well, but even with a positive experience, it’s clear to me – and to many of my peers and colleagues – that this exam is not a genuine reflection of one’s knowledge or ability to become a good solicitor.

Finally, the SRA’s lack of transparency around the SQE process is deeply concerning. The use of NDAs, the refusal to release past papers, and the stark difference between sample questions and the actual exam all undermine trust in the system. For a profession built on the values of fairness, openness, and integrity, this level of opacity is shocking.

You’re in the wrong profession if you don’t understand that something that long is not persuasive

Speaking as a foreign qualified associate in MC firm who’s done years of legal education abroad and is sitting the SQE2 now, it is still challenging to pass it.

Probably in the wrong profession if you consider that so long it’s worthy of comment.

I suspect the average chancery judgment would send you into a coma.

Pegging a Slaughter and May trainee on the same scoring range as a paralegal from a High Street solicitor, to find the latter is actually better.. there were always going to be consequences!!!

Accuracy and integrity matter.