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. They’d failed SQE1 and couldn’t 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. I’m 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 didn’t pass their first sitting of SQE 1. The group that’s supposed to do better did worse. The reason isn’t complicated. The exam doesn’t 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 there’s 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 can’t afford to qualify at all, there’s 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.
I’m glad these things exist but look at what they are; a profession having to quietly pass round a hat to patch a route that doesn’t work. You don’t build a fund to solve a problem that isn’t there, and you don’t 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 hasn’t. No one should have to hand over thousands of pounds for a course with no way to compare what they’re buying and just hope for the best. My apprentices didn’t pay for their own course (the apprenticeship levy did) but they were entirely dependent on that provider to prepare them, and many felt afterwards that its materials bore little resemblance to the exam they actually sat. They got one funded resit, as everyone does. When they didn’t pass that either, they were out of funded attempts — facing a third and final try, at their own expense, with their place in the profession riding on it. That’s the £2,000 they suddenly had to find.
It’s tempting to file all this under individual bad luck but it isn’t; it’s a pipeline problem, and the country can’t afford it. We are living through an advice-desert crisis — whole regions where someone facing eviction or a benefits sanction cannot find a legal aid lawyer at all. The people best placed to close that gap are the ones already in it: apprentices and trainees committed enough to build their careers in social welfare law on modest pay. If the route to qualification keeps failing them, through content that ignores their work, costs they can’t meet, and providers they can’t assess, some will leave and others will never start. Every one of those losses lands on a community that already can’t get help.
There are simple solutions to many of these challenges:
- Give the SQE optional or elective content in the areas social welfare lawyers actually practise — housing, welfare, discrimination.
- Fund SQE routes into the sector properly and at scale.
- Have the SRA publish provider outcomes, so everybody can make properly informed decisions.
The SQE was sold as a way to open the profession up but for the lawyers our communities need most, it will only do that when the exam, the funding and the support reflect the work they actually do.
Until then, we’re relying on anonymous donors to keep tomorrow’s social justice lawyers in the profession at all. That should worry everyone who cares how this country gets its legal help, not just those of us watching it happen.
Noella Gooden is the Workforce Development and EDI Lead at Law Centres Network.
