The route most people are now on, whether they chose it or not
If you started a law degree in September 2022 or later, you qualify as a solicitor through the Solicitors Qualifying Examination. There is no alternative for you, and there is no list of SRA-approved undergraduate law degrees that applies to you. The SQE has two stages: SQE1, two multiple-choice papers on functioning legal knowledge, and SQE2, a set of written and oral skills assessments. Alongside them you need a degree or equivalent, two years of qualifying work experience, and to satisfy the SRA’s character and suitability requirements.
The qualifying work experience does not have to be a training contract. It can be up to four placements, signed off by a solicitor or a compliance officer, which is the single biggest practical difference from the route it replaced.
The legacy route is closing on published dates
The Legal Practice Course route survives only for people who meet the SRA’s transitional requirements. Those are: a Common Professional Examination or graduate diploma in law completed and accepted before 1 September 2021; or a qualifying law degree or exempting law degree offer accepted by 21 September 2021 with the course started before 31 December 2021 and now completed; or a deferred 2020/21 offer started by 31 August 2022 inclusive. Anyone who started a qualifying law degree in September 2022 or later cannot use it.
If you are eligible, the SRA’s page states that you have until 31 December 2032 to apply for admission by that route, and that most Legal Practice Course providers are phasing the course out in the 2025/26 academic year. That second point is the one that bites first: eligibility is worth nothing if nobody is teaching the course.
The Central Applications Board, which runs the shared application system for professional legal education, reports that Legal Practice Course enrolments through it fell 73 per cent in a year, that only seven higher education institutions offered the course for 2025/26, and that 7 per cent of the reduced places were taken. Its SQE course enrolments went the other way: 217 in 2021/22, 973 in 2022/23, 2,311 in 2023/24, 3,716 in 2024/25 and 4,430 in 2025/26, across 24 providers. The report says plainly that these are its own members’ figures and that some SQE providers do not use it, so they are not national totals and we do not present them as any.
What the admission figures show about the switch
In the twelve months to August 2026 the SRA admitted 9,384 solicitors. Of those, 4,800 came through the Legal Practice Course and a period of recognised training (51 per cent), 4,050 through the SQE (43 per cent), 166 through CILEX and the justices’ clerks route, 158 from the Republic of Ireland and 134 by equivalent means. In the twelve months before, 9,582 were admitted, with the legacy route at 6,059 (63 per cent) and the SQE at 3,042 (32 per cent).
The SQE share rose 11 percentage points in a single year. The total did not rise at all. A route changed; the number of new solicitors did not.
What the SQE results actually predict
In the January 2026 SQE1 sitting, 7,918 candidates sat both parts and 53 per cent passed; among the 6,760 first-attempt candidates, 58 per cent passed. The passing score was 300, with an FLK1 mean of 311.2 and an FLK2 mean of 304.3. First-attempt pass rates by undergraduate degree classification were 79 per cent for a first, 57 per cent for a 2:1, 20 per cent for a 2:2 and 27 per cent for a third.
In the January 2026 SQE2 sitting, 1,141 candidates were graded and 80 per cent passed, including 79 per cent of the 873 first-attempt candidates. The mean was 330.4 and the median 331, against a pass mark of 300, with a range from 128 to 459. By degree classification, first-attempt pass rates were 92 per cent for a first, 81 per cent for a 2:1 and 53 per cent for a 2:2.
The SRA’s own four-year review found that prior education and attainment explains 23 per cent of the variation in SQE1 performance, university ranking 11.9 per cent and degree classification 10.6 per cent. Sixty-seven per cent of the variation is unexplained by anything the SRA records. Nobody can sell you the other 67 per cent, and anyone who implies they can is selling something they have not measured.
The SRA publishes no SQE pass rate by training provider or by university attended. The January 2026 reports contain no such breakdown. Any provider pass rate in circulation is self-reported by that provider and unverified, so we publish none.
The apprenticeship: six years, no tuition debt, and a hard application
The solicitor apprenticeship is a level 7 apprenticeship under standard ST0246. The published standard sets a typical duration of 72 months, with SQE1 as the gateway to the end-point assessment and SQE2 as the end-point assessment itself, and a maximum funding band of £27,000. You are an employee throughout, paid, with the training funded rather than borrowed.
Level 6 and level 7 apprenticeship starts reached 60,350 in 2024/25, up 20.4 per cent, and made up 17.1 per cent of all apprenticeship starts; level 7 alone rose 40.7 per cent to 33,560. The apprentices are also, on the published figures, doing better in the assessments: 1,377 of 1,896 solicitor apprentices passed SQE1 (70.5 per cent) and 824 of 887 passed SQE2 (92.9 per cent), against 66 per cent and 85 per cent for all candidates in the SRA’s cumulative figures.
Public funding for level 7 apprenticeships was reported as restricted for new starters aged 22 and over from January 2026. We could not confirm that against the primary apprenticeship funding rules, so it is not confirmed here, and you should check with the employer and the provider before relying on it.
CILEX: a smaller route, and smaller than it looks
There are 11,603 people on CILEx Regulation’s register, of whom 7,498 are chartered legal executives. CILEx Regulation approved 1,120 authorisations in 2024. Set against 9,384 solicitor admissions in the twelve months to August 2026, that is the honest scale of the route — and 1,120 is a count of authorisation decisions, not a student population, so it is not the number of people studying.
The route is work-based and generally part-time, which is its point: you are employed while you qualify and the fees are a fraction of a full-time course. What it is not is a quicker way to the same authorisation. A chartered legal executive has specific practice rights, which is a different thing from a solicitor’s. What each register permits sets those out one profession at a time.
The Bar: the route where the arithmetic is the lesson
There are 18,852 barristers on the Bar Standards Board register, of whom 15,104 are in self-employed practice and only 3,748 are employed by an organisation. Choosing the Bar is mostly choosing to run a business.
The published training figures are blunt. 1,959 people were called to the Bar in 2024/25. In 2024 there were 581 registered pupillages, 462 of them in chambers and 119 at the employed Bar, and roughly 395 tenancies obtained. Bar vocational training enrolments reached 2,446 in 2024/25, up 45 per cent on the 1,685 of 2019/20, while pupillage supply rose 1.8 per cent. The Bar Standards Board itself has warned that this will push down the proportion of students progressing.
The Bar also has the only mandatory pay floor in legal training, and the only provider-level outcome data a regulator publishes anywhere in English and Welsh professional legal training. Both are on the cost page.
One test you do not have to sit
The Bar Course Aptitude Test has not been required since 31 July 2022, when the Bar Standards Board abolished the requirement on the basis that it no longer served a useful purpose. Several commercial prep vendors still sell 2026-dated preparation for it. If you are offered BCAT coaching, you are being sold preparation for an assessment that does not gate anything. The tests you will actually sit are a different list.
What none of these sources tell you
- How long qualifying work experience takes to find. Nobody publishes it. The SRA records that experience was signed off, not how long the applicant spent looking.
- Which employers accept which routes. There is no published register of employers’ route preferences, and a firm’s own careers page is marketing rather than data.
- Whether the apprenticeship or the degree route is better for you. The published apprentice pass rates are higher, but apprentices are a selected group recruited by employers against their own criteria, so the comparison is not like for like and we will not present it as one.
Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.
Assize Careers is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board, CILEx Regulation, Skills England or the Department for Education.