A candidate messaged us last January at 06:40, forty minutes before her FLK1 session. Her booking confirmation said one spelling of her middle name; her passport said another. She had revised Contract and Tort for five months and was now standing outside a test centre in Birmingham, shaking, googling whether they would let her in.
They did, as it happens — but only after a long conversation at the desk that she sat down from, still rattled, with four minutes to spare. That is the thing about exam day. You spend hundreds of hours on the law and almost none on the logistics, and the logistics are the part that can cost you the paper. So let us deal with them properly.
Two weeks out: the Pearson VUE booking details that actually matter
Open your booking confirmation now, not the night before. You are checking three things, and all three are boring.
First, the name. The name on your photo ID must match the name on your booking. Not "basically match" — match. If your passport has a middle name and your SRA account does not, or your surname is hyphenated in one place and spaced in the other, fix it with the SRA before the window closes rather than arguing it at the check-in desk. Second, the address of the centre. Some cities have more than one Pearson VUE site, and they are not always near each other. Third, the reporting time, which is usually earlier than the start time because check-in takes a while when twenty candidates arrive at once.
If you need reasonable adjustments — extra time, a separate room, rest breaks, a particular chair — those have to be approved and attached to your booking in advance. You cannot negotiate them on the day. No invigilator has the authority to grant you twenty extra minutes because you explain your condition well.
Do this today: screenshot your booking confirmation, save it offline, and put the centre address into your maps app. Then look at how you would get there if the first train were cancelled. Candidates who have a plan B arrive calm even when plan A holds.
What to bring to the test centre — and what to leave at home
The honest answer is that you bring almost nothing into the room itself. Pearson VUE centres are secure testing environments, and the default position is that everything personal goes into a locker.
Bring with you:
- Valid, in-date, government-issued photo ID with a signature — a passport is the safest choice. Check the expiry date. An expired passport is not ID.
- Your booking confirmation or confirmation number, on paper if you can.
- Water in a clear bottle and something to eat for the break, on the assumption you will store both in your locker and use them between sessions.
- A jumper or layers. You cannot control the temperature of the room and you will be there for most of the day.
- Any approved medication or adjustment documentation.
Leave at home, or expect to lock away: your phone, smartwatch and any watch at all, headphones, notes, textbooks, flashcards, bags, coats, hats and food. Pockets are usually checked. Do not test the boundaries here — a scribbled formula on your wrist is not a clever hack, it is a potential misconduct finding that follows you into your character and suitability assessment. Think about what you are actually qualifying for.
One practical point people forget: your watch is going in the locker, so the on-screen timer is your only clock. Practise with an on-screen timer rather than your phone propped against a mug. It reads differently when it is counting down in a corner of the screen and you cannot glance at your wrist.
Inside the room: how SQE1 FLK1 and FLK2 actually run
You will be photographed, asked to sign in, given a locker key, and walked to a workstation in a room where other people are sitting entirely different exams. Somebody beside you may be taking an IT certification and typing hard. Noise-reducing headsets or earplugs are normally available at the desk — ask for them when you check in, not twenty minutes into the paper.
The structure you are sitting is fixed. SQE1 is two separate papers, FLK1 and FLK2, each containing 170 single best answer multiple choice questions, delivered in two sessions of 85 questions. Each session runs for 2 hours 33 minutes — roughly 1.8 minutes per question. Ethics and professional conduct are pervasive: they are not a seventh or fourteenth subject sitting in its own box, they turn up inside a Business Law question about a conflict or a Property question about acting for both parties.
From the January 2027 sitting onwards, the questions are grouped by session, which changes how you should warm up. FLK1 Session 1 covers Business Law and Practice, Dispute Resolution and Legal Services; FLK1 Session 2 covers Tort, Contract Law and Legal Systems (English Legal System together with Constitutional and Administrative Law and EU Law). FLK2 Session 1 covers Wills and the Administration of Estates, Solicitors Accounts, Trusts and Land Law; FLK2 Session 2 covers Property Law and Practice, Solicitors Accounts, Criminal Liability and Criminal Law and Practice. Practically, that means the mental switching cost drops — but it also means a weak subject can dominate a single session. If Solicitors Accounts frightens you, note that it appears in both FLK2 sessions.
SQE2 on the closed platform: no browser, no Boolean, Ctrl+F only
SQE2 assesses five skills — Client Interviewing (with attendance note), Advocacy, Case and Matter Analysis, Legal Research, and Legal Writing and Drafting — across the written and oral stations. The written assessments are delivered on the Pearson VUE closed platform, and this is where candidates lose marks for reasons that have nothing to do with their legal knowledge.
There is no internet. There is no browser. There is no Boolean search, no "AND", no proximity operators, no case citator as you know it. You have the materials provided on screen and Ctrl+F. The Legal Research task runs for 60 minutes, and a candidate who is used to typing a natural-language query into a research platform will burn fifteen of those minutes discovering that the tool does not work that way.
So rehearse it. Take a PDF of a statute — the Limitation Act 1980 is a good one — and answer a question using nothing but Ctrl+F. Search for single distinctive words rather than phrases. "Deceit" rather than "action founded on deceit". Notice how often you need to read the section either side of your hit, because the definition lives in a different subsection from the rule.
For the oral stations you are in a room with an assessor and, for interviewing, a role-player. Dress as you would for a client. Not because there are marks for a jacket, but because candidates behave more like solicitors when they look like them.
Pacing, flagging and the break between sessions
At 1.8 minutes a question you cannot afford a single hostage. Here is the rule we give every candidate: if you have read a question twice and you still do not know what it is testing, pick the answer that is least wrong, flag it, and move. The flag function and the review screen exist for exactly this. One Trusts question about tracing is worth the same mark as one question about whether a sole director can bind the company.
Check your position at question 21, 42 and 64 — roughly quarters. If you are behind at 42 you still have time to recover; if you only notice at 80, you do not. And resist the urge to change answers wholesale in the last ten minutes. Change an answer when you have spotted a fact you genuinely misread, not because option C has started to feel lonely.
Use the scheduled break properly. Eat something, drink water, go outside if you can, and do not discuss the first session with anybody. Nothing good comes from learning that the person next to you answered the easement question differently. Unscheduled breaks are a different matter — stepping out mid-session will generally cost you your own exam time, so plan your water intake accordingly. Yes, that is an unglamorous sentence. It has saved people marks.
The night before: a short, honest list
Do not learn anything new. Read your own one-page summaries, the ones in your handwriting, and go to bed. If you want a final skim, make it the high-frequency anchors rather than the exotica:
- Duty of care and the neighbour principle from Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562, then breach, causation and remoteness in order.
- Default partnership positions under the Partnership Act 1890 — equal profit sharing under s 24, and joint liability for partnership debts.
- Limitation: six years for simple contract under s 5 of the Limitation Act 1980, three years for personal injury under s 11.
- Land: contracts for the sale of land in writing and signed under s 2 of the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989; a deed required for a legal conveyance under s 52 of the Law of Property Act 1925; overriding interests under the Land Registration Act 2002.
- Will formalities under s 9 of the Wills Act 1837, and the consequences of a gift to an attesting witness.
- The conflict and confidentiality rules, because ethics is everywhere.
Lay out your ID, your confirmation, your clothes and your water bottle before you sleep. Set two alarms. Leave earlier than you need to and accept that you will sit in a coffee shop near the centre for twenty minutes doing nothing. That twenty minutes of nothing is worth more than twenty minutes of revision, and I say that as someone who has watched a lot of candidates walk in flustered.
How CELE SQE can help
We have been teaching SQE candidates since the first sitting in 2021, across all 13 subjects in FLK1 and FLK2, and exam-day drilling is part of the course rather than an afterthought. If you want timed practice under proper conditions, the SQE1 Question Bank subscription is £575 per month; the full SQE1 courses run from £1,750 for the Short-term Course to £2,750 mid-term and £3,720 long-term, with a single FLK at half price and £150 off for early bird or within-three-months-of-exam bookings. Textbooks are £950 for the full set, or £570 for a single FLK set, and the SQE2 Course is £1,450 including 61 full mock questions built 1:1 to the official SRA format — including closed-platform research practice.
Questions about your own sitting? We are on WeChat at SQE100, at [email protected], or at celebar.com. Check your ID tonight.
