- Yes. There is no requirement to take an SQE1 preparation course, and candidates pass without one.
- The honest question is not whether it is possible but whether it is sensible for you, and that turns on how many of the thirteen subjects you have never studied.
- A law graduate revisiting familiar subjects is doing revision. A career changer meeting Land Law and Trusts for the first time is doing a degree's worth of teaching alone.
- Self study has to replace three things a course provides: structure, teaching of unfamiliar subjects, and a large volume of timed practice.
- Replace all three and self study works. Replace only the cheap one and it does not. Checked 9 September 2026.
The short answer
Yes, you can pass SQE1 without a prep course. Nothing in the solicitor qualification route requires one, the SRA does not mandate a provider, and people pass every sitting having studied on their own. Whether that is a good decision for you is a different question, and it depends on how much of the syllabus you have genuinely never been taught.
This page is about that second question, because the first one is easy and misleading. We are independent of the SRA and Kaplan, this is not legal advice, and it is not an argument that nobody should buy a course. Checked 9 September 2026.
Two candidates, two completely different answers
Almost every unhelpful answer to this question comes from treating candidates as one group. They are not.
A candidate with a qualifying law degree has already been taught contract, tort, land law, trusts, criminal law, constitutional law and probably more. For them, self study means revision: reactivating knowledge that exists, filling the practice-flavoured gaps such as Solicitors Accounts and Property Practice, and learning the single best answer format. That is a well defined job with a clear finish line, and it is very doable alone.
A career changer coming from a non-law background is doing something else entirely. Meeting Land Law, Trusts and Business Law and Practice for the first time is not revision. It is being taught a body of law from nothing, in a form that has to be robust enough to survive a five-option question designed to make two answers look right. Being taught is faster than teaching yourself, and it is more reliable.
Most people sit between the two. The useful exercise is to go through the thirteen subjects and put each one in a column: taught and remembered, taught and forgotten, never taught. The third column is what you would be paying a course to fix.
What self study has to replace
A course is not one product. It is three, sold together, and if you skip it you have to source all three yourself. Missing one of them is where self study fails.
- Structure. A course tells you what to study, in what order, and by when. On your own that becomes a written plan with dated milestones and a fixed exam target, not a vague intention to get through the syllabus. Without it, the well known subjects get studied and the frightening ones get postponed.
- Teaching of unfamiliar subjects. For anything in your never-taught column you need a real source of instruction: a textbook or revision series you actually work through, and ideally something that explains rather than lists. Notes summarising a subject you do not yet understand are not teaching.
- Volume of practice under a clock. This is the one that decides results and the one most often skipped. SQE1 is 360 single best answer questions across two papers, each sat as two sessions of 90 questions in 153 minutes, about 102 seconds a question. That pace is a trained skill. Reading does not train it.
When self study is a bad idea
There is no prize for doing this the hard way, and it is worth being blunt about the cases where a course is genuinely the better purchase.
If most of the syllabus is new to you, buy teaching. If you have failed a sitting already and cannot identify why beyond a general sense that it was hard, buy teaching, because the diagnostic problem is as much the issue as the knowledge. If you know from experience that you do not finish things without a deadline set by somebody else, buy the structure, because self discipline is the hidden input in every self study plan and it is not evenly distributed. And if your employer or a training contract offer is paying, the calculation changes entirely.
A reader who needs teaching should leave this page knowing that. The argument here is against paying for a course you do not need, not against courses.
When self study works well
Self study is a strong option when your gap is knowledge rather than instruction. If you have a law degree or an LLM behind you, if you have studied most of the thirteen subjects at some point, if you can hold a schedule without external pressure, and if you can get hold of a large volume of good practice questions, you have all three inputs covered and the course would mostly be selling you back things you already have.
It also works well as a partial choice. Nothing forces the decision to be all or nothing. Buying teaching for the two or three subjects you have never studied, and self studying the rest, is often the cheapest sensible route and it is rarely the one that gets recommended to you.
The money, honestly
Prep courses vary widely in price and are frequently a four-figure purchase, on top of the SRA assessment fees, which you pay whichever route you take. We do not quote a specific provider's price here, because every claim about a named provider should come from that provider's own published page and prices move. Check the provider's website for the current figure before you commit. Checked 9 September 2026.
What is worth saying is that the three things a course sells do not cost the same to buy separately. Structure costs nothing but discipline. Teaching costs the price of good books. Practice volume is the cheapest of the three to buy on its own, and it is the one that most directly moves your score.
For disclosure: we build an SQE1 app, which is a paid question bank with full timed mocks across all thirteen subjects, at £14.99 a month or £69.99 for lifetime access with a 3 day trial, and it is still in build rather than on the App Store. That is our own product and we have an obvious interest in you buying it, so weigh it against the alternatives rather than taking our word for it. It replaces the practice half of a course. It does not replace the teaching half, and we would rather say so than sell it to someone who needs a tutor. Checked 9 September 2026.
How to decide in twenty minutes
Write out the thirteen subjects. Mark each one taught and remembered, taught and forgotten, or never taught. Then answer two more questions: do you reliably finish long projects without an external deadline, and can you get access to several hundred good practice questions with explanations.
If your never-taught count is low and both answers are yes, self study is a reasonable plan and you should build the schedule this week. If your never-taught count is high, or either answer is no, spend the money on the specific thing you are missing rather than on the bundle. That is the whole decision, and it does not need three months of agonising.
Where to go next
This page sits under the SQE preparation course guide, which goes properly into what a course buys, who should pay for one, and what to compare if you decide to.
If you are self studying, what is on FLK2 gives you the seven subjects on the second paper to audit yourself against, and are there free SQE1 mock tests covers what practice material is available without paying. For pacing and hours, see how to pass SQE1.
