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Routes into law

The solicitor apprenticeship

Six years, employed throughout, with somebody else paying the fees. Nobody publishes a count of solicitor apprenticeship starts, so nobody can tell you how fast this route is growing; what is published is that the apprentices who have reached the SQE have passed it at a higher rate than the cohort as a whole.

Last reviewed 12 October 2026.

An apprenticeship is a job with a qualification attached, so you apply to an employer rather than to a course. The Department for Education sets the standard, the employer and the public purse pay for the training, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority admits you at the end on exactly the same terms as anybody else. There is no second-class admission.

The standard, as published

Reference
ST0246, “Solicitor”
Level
7
Typical duration
72 months
Maximum funding band
£27,000
Gateway
SQE1
End-point assessment
SQE2
Versions
Version 1.0 approved 3 September 2015. Version 1.1 ran from 11 January 2024 to 30 April 2026. Version 2.0 is approved for delivery from 1 May 2026.

Those particulars are quoted from the standard’s own page at Skills England, which carries this grant: Crown copyright © 2026. You may re-use this information (not including logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

The version pages are easy to misread. The page for version 1.1 is headed Retired, which refers to that version and not to the standard. The Solicitor apprenticeship is live and version 2.0 is approved for delivery.

The stages, in order

  1. Apply to an employer, not to a provider

    The vacancy is a job. The employer chooses the training provider, and the recruitment timetable is the employer’s own: some run alongside their school-leaver and graduate schemes, some do not. The application calendar explains why we print no date here that an employer has not published.

  2. Six years of work, with study inside it

    Seventy-two months is the typical duration in the published standard, which is longer than a law degree plus the SQE and is spent earning rather than paying. You are an employee with a contract of employment throughout.

  3. SQE1 as the gateway

    You cannot reach the end-point assessment without it. The pass rates and the fees are on the solicitor route page, and they apply to apprentices in exactly the same way.

  4. SQE2 as the end-point assessment

    The apprenticeship’s final assessment is the same assessment every other candidate for admission sits. That is unusual among apprenticeships and it is the reason the route carries the same standing.

  5. Admission by the SRA

    The SRA admits you and enters your name on the roll, with the same practising rights as anyone admitted through a degree and the SQE.

Apprentices have passed at a higher rate than the cohort as a whole

Solicitor apprentices have passed at a higher rate than the cohort as a whole: 1,377 of 1,896 passed SQE1, 70.5%, and 824 of 887 passed SQE2, 92.9%, against 66% and 85% for all candidates. All candidates includes the apprentices, so this is not apprentices against graduates. Those are the SRA’s cumulative figures to July 2025, published on 29 January 2026.

Read them with the caveat the SRA attaches: they are cumulative across four years of a changing assessment rather than a single cohort, and they stop before the sittings since. They do not say that an apprenticeship makes you pass. What they do show is that the people this route selects and prepares have not passed at a lower rate than everybody else, which is the opposite of what most careers advice implies about it.

How fast this part of the market is growing

Across all sectors in England there were 353,500 apprenticeship starts in 2024/25, up 4.1%, with 761,480 people participating and 198,330 achievements, up 11.3%. Starts at level 4 and above reached 140,730, up 15.1%. Levels 6 and 7 together reached 60,350 starts, up 20.4% and 17.1% of all starts: 26,780 at level 6 and 33,560 at level 7, with level 7 alone up 40.7%.

The solicitor standard is a level 7 apprenticeship, so it sits in the fastest-growing part of that series by level. That says nothing about the number of solicitor apprenticeships, which is not published by standard. The Department also publishes in-year figures for 2025/26, which are reported to date rather than a complete academic year, so we do not compare them with the 2024/25 total and neither should anybody else.

Public funding for level 7 apprenticeships was reported as restricted for new starters aged 22 and over from January 2026. We could not confirm this against the primary apprenticeship funding rules, so check with the provider before relying on it. It is the single question most worth asking an employer before you apply.

We do not publish a count of solicitor apprenticeship starts. The breakdown by named standard is not in the Department’s statistics API — only in its bulk data catalogue — and we have not yet ingested that file. When we do, the figure will appear here with its date.

The other legal apprenticeship

The Advanced paralegal apprenticeship, standard ST1476, is a level 5 apprenticeship with a maximum funding band of £18,000, and version 2.0 was approved for delivery on 25 July 2025. It does not lead to admission as a solicitor on its own. It is a shorter and cheaper way into legal work, and the CILEX route builds on the same kind of employment.

Who sets the rules, as at today

The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education was abolished at 2 a.m. on 1 June 2025, by regulations commencing section 3 of and Schedule 3 to the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Act 2025. Its functions transferred to the Secretary of State. Skills England is a Department for Education executive agency exercising them, not a statutory successor body, so the right attribution for a standard today is “Department for Education (Skills England)”. The same Act renamed the apprenticeship levy the growth and skills levy.

Anything citing IfATE as a current regulator was written before June 2025, which is a quick way to date a careers page you are reading.

What nobody publishes

  • What solicitor apprentices are paid. There is no published figure for the standard, and the national minimum wage rules for apprentices are the floor rather than the rate. Employers publish their own, and that is the number to ask for.
  • How many employers run the standard. No list is published that we could verify.
  • Completion rates for the solicitor standard specifically. The achievement figures above are for all apprenticeships at all levels.

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.