Free, Official, and Surprisingly Misused
The SRA hosts a bank of SQE1 sample questions that any candidate can access without paying anything, registering, or even creating an account. As of December 2025, the bank contains 220 questions split between FLK1 and FLK2. Around 130 of those have been used in real SQE1 sittings; the others are specimen questions written to the same standard. The most recent batch of 50 questions was published in late 2025 and is the most reliable sample yet of what the current SRA assessment looks like.
This is, on paper, a generous resource. It is also one of the most consistently misused resources in the SQE1 ecosystem. Candidates burn through the bank in a single weekend, score above 70%, and conclude that the real exam will be similar — only to fail in a sitting that turns out to be substantially harder. Other candidates ignore the bank entirely, on the assumption that anything free must be of marginal quality. Both responses leave value on the table.
This post explains exactly what the SRA bank is, what it is not, why community data shows it scores easier than the real exam, and how to extract the maximum exam-relevant value from a finite, free, official resource — before turning to a paid bank like our 3,500+ practice question library for the volume the SRA cannot supply.
What the Bank Actually Contains
The SRA has released SQE1 sample questions in four batches since the assessment launched:
| Release | Questions added | Cumulative total | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Original specimen | ~40 | ~40 | Pre-launch specimen, not used in real sittings |
| November 2023 | 40 | 80 | Drawn from real SQE1 assessments |
| November 2024 | 40 | 120 | Drawn from real SQE1 assessments |
| December 2025 | 50 | 220 | Drawn from real SQE1 assessments; includes refreshed performance data |
Today's bank holds 220 questions split roughly evenly between FLK1 and FLK2. The SRA has explicitly confirmed that around 130 of the questions have appeared in real SQE1 sittings and have been retired from the active question pool — meaning you cannot encounter the same question on your own exam, but the format and style are directly representative.
Each sample question includes:
- The full scenario (typically 2–4 short paragraphs).
- Five answer options labelled A through E.
- The correct answer and a written explanation.
- Performance data — the percentage of candidates in the original sitting who answered correctly, and the discrimination index for that question.
The performance data is the most underused part of the bank. We come back to it later.
Where to Find Them
The official location is the SRA's SQE site at sqe.sra.org.uk/assessments/sqe1-assessments/sqe1-sample-questions. Questions are organised by FLK1 and FLK2 and within each paper by subject. The SRA also publishes a single PDF compilation, although the web interface is generally easier to work with because it preserves the answer-explanation structure.
Do not download SRA sample questions from third-party sites. The questions get re-typed, sometimes incorrectly, and the answer explanations occasionally drift. The official SRA pages are the canonical version.
Why They Are Easier Than the Real Exam
Here is the part that catches candidates out. Community-collected data — including data we have aggregated from candidates using our own practice mocks — consistently shows that the SRA's sample questions are roughly 10–15 percentage points easier than the live exam. A candidate scoring 75% on the SRA bank typically scores 60–65% on a representative SQE1 paper.
There are several plausible reasons.
The bank is curated. The SRA chose questions to publish, and an institution with an interest in candidate confidence will tend not to publish the most punishing examples. The hardest questions in the live exam — the ones where the discriminator is buried in a single procedural detail — disproportionately stay in the active bank.
The selection skews to questions with clean discrimination. Questions chosen for publication tend to have a clear right answer and four cleanly distinguishable wrong answers. The hardest live SQE1 questions often have two answers that look defensible until you spot the subtle distinction — a question type that is harder to publish cleanly because the explanation has to walk through why the second-best answer is not the best.
Answer-option engineering. The published explanations tend to dispatch the wrong answers fairly quickly. In live questions, the wrong-answer engineering is often more aggressive, and the candidate has to do more work to eliminate options.
Topic clustering. The bank covers all major subjects but not in proportion to the live exam's distribution. Some hard topics — for example, the more procedural Property Practice or BLP detail — are under-represented relative to their actual exam share.
The direct consequence: do not use your SRA sample question score as a pass/fail indicator for the real exam. A 70% on the SRA bank is not the same signal as a 70% on a representative third-party mock. Candidates who calibrate their preparation against the SRA bank alone almost universally over-estimate their readiness.
What the Bank Is Genuinely Useful For
The reason to use the SRA bank is not its difficulty. It is its authority. Every other question writer — including us — is reverse-engineering what the SRA is testing from the published assessment specification, the small published bank, and candidate reports of real exam questions. The SRA bank is, by definition, the closest thing you have to questions written by the people who write the real exam.
Three specific uses where the bank is irreplaceable.
1. Calibrating Question Style and Length
Real SQE1 scenarios run 2–4 paragraphs. The fact pattern often includes information that turns out to be irrelevant — facts inserted to test whether you can identify the legally significant detail. The answer options are written in the SRA's house style: parallel construction, similar length, deliberately overlapping legal concepts.
If you have only ever practised on third-party banks, you will be familiar with the content of the exam but not its texture. A candidate who has worked through 50 SRA samples has a much sharper sense of how SRA questions phrase scenarios, where the discriminator usually lives, and how the wrong answers are constructed. That texture is hard to learn from explanations alone.
2. Studying the Performance Data
This is the single most underused feature of the bank. Every published sample question shows the percentage of real candidates who answered it correctly. The data is gold for two reasons.
It identifies hard topics. If 35% of candidates got a question on equitable interests right, that topic is genuinely hard for the median candidate. If 80% got a question on contract formation right, that topic is unlikely to be where you fail. Use the published data to rank your revision time by topic difficulty, not by topic interest. The SQE1 hardest subjects ranked guide covers this prioritisation in detail.
It identifies your blind spots. If you got a question wrong that 70% of candidates got right, you have a knowledge gap that the median candidate does not. That gap should go straight onto a flashcard, using the protocol in our SQE1 flashcard strategy.
3. Stress-Testing Your Test-Reading Speed
A standard SQE1 paper gives you roughly 90 seconds per question across the 90-question session. The 220 sample questions are a fair training set for reading the question, identifying the issue, and choosing an answer under time. We recommend pacing the bank in 90-second blocks per question, with a hard cut-off — even if you would normally spend longer on a hard question, training to the timing is more valuable than getting one extra question right in slow conditions.
How to Work Through the Bank: A 5-Day Protocol
Most candidates speed-run the SRA bank in a weekend, get tired, do the questions sloppily, and miss the value. A better protocol uses five focused sessions and converts the bank into a learning resource rather than a one-time test.
Day 1: Diagnostic — FLK1 Half (45 questions, 90 minutes)
Sit a 45-question session under timed conditions. No notes. No pausing. Mark your answers as you go.
After the timer ends, do not look at the answers immediately. Take a 30-minute break. Then go through every question:
- For correct answers: read the explanation anyway. Confirm your reasoning matches the SRA's.
- For wrong answers: read the explanation slowly. Identify whether the gap is knowledge (you did not know the rule) or application (you knew the rule but mis-applied it).
- For each wrong answer: write a flashcard for the missing fact or pattern. One fact per card.
Day 2: Diagnostic — FLK1 Second Half (45 questions, 90 minutes)
Same protocol. By the end of day 2, you have completed FLK1 once and produced 15–30 flashcards.
Day 3: Diagnostic — FLK2 (Both halves; 80–110 questions over two sittings)
The FLK2 portion of the bank is slightly larger than FLK1 in some releases. Sit it in two 90-minute sessions on the same day, with a 30-minute break.
Day 4: Performance Data Review
Open the SRA pages and sort your wrong answers by the percentage of candidates who got the question right in the live sitting. This is the prioritisation step.
- Wrong answers where 80%+ of candidates got it right: critical gaps. Triple-check your flashcards. These are knowledge points the median candidate has and you do not.
- Wrong answers where 50–80% got it right: standard misses. Keep the flashcards in rotation.
- Wrong answers where <50% got it right: hard questions. Worth understanding, but if you are short on time, prioritise the high-percentage misses first.
Day 5: Re-Run Your Wrong Answers Only
Re-do every question you got wrong on days 1–3. Do not look at the answers first. The goal is to confirm that your flashcards have actually transferred the knowledge into recall.
After day 5, you have wrung the SRA bank for everything it can give you. The flashcards stay in your daily review queue. The next step is volume — and that is where third-party banks come in.
When You Have Exhausted the SRA Bank
220 questions is roughly 60% of a single FLK1 paper. As a sole revision tool, it is far too small. The SRA's own assessment specification is open about this — the sample questions are designed to "illustrate" the assessment, not to substitute for full preparation.
After the SRA bank, you have three realistic options for additional volume.
Provider-bundled banks (BPP, ULaw, BARBRI, College of Legal Practice) typically include 1,500–3,000 questions as part of their full prep course. Quality is generally good but cost is high — typically £2,000–£10,000 for the full course, which our provider comparison post breaks down. If you are not enrolled in a provider course, you cannot access these banks separately.
Standalone third-party banks are the middle ground. We list and rank the realistic options in our free SQE1 resources guide. Quality varies; verify that the bank in question writes to the current SRA specification, not the pre-2024 specification.
Our own bank ships with 3,500+ practice questions across all 13 subjects and 142 topics, plus full FLK1 and FLK2 mock exams under timed conditions. The questions are written to the current SRA specification, mapped to topic and subject for granular performance tracking, and priced as a one-time purchase (1-month, 6-month, or 12-month plans) rather than a five-figure course fee. See our pricing for plan details.
The right combination for most candidates is: work the SRA bank first for calibration, then spend the bulk of your hours in a high-volume third-party bank for genuine exam-fit practice. The two are complementary, not interchangeable.
A Note on Specimen Questions vs Real Questions
The SRA bank mixes original "specimen" questions (~40 from the pre-launch period) with questions that have actually been used in real sittings (~130 since November 2023, plus the 50 added in December 2025).
The specimen questions are slightly different in style from the post-launch questions. They are written to the same specification, but they were drafted before the SRA had observed how real SQE1 candidates actually performed against the specification. Some specimen questions are more academic in tone than the live exam. The real-sitting questions are the better calibration tool.
If you have to choose, prioritise the post-November 2023 batches. The December 2025 release in particular is the freshest available signal of current SQE1 style.
Common Mistakes With the SRA Bank
A short catalogue of the failure modes we see most often.
Speed-running the bank in one sitting. You finish 220 questions in seven hours, exhausted, and remember almost nothing of the explanations. The bank's value is in the reflection, not the throughput.
Treating it as a benchmark. A 75% on the SRA bank is not the same signal as a 75% on a representative mock. We covered why above.
Ignoring the performance data. The published percentages tell you which questions are hard for the median candidate. Use them.
Re-doing the same questions weekly. Once you have seen a sample question, the value of a re-do drops sharply. The bank is finite. Use each question once for a clean diagnostic, once for a wrong-answer re-run, and then leave it.
Using the bank as a substitute for full mocks. 90 questions in one session with no break is materially harder than 45 questions, and SQE1 is graded on 180-question papers. You cannot train exam stamina with a 45-question sample.
Where to Go From Here
The SRA's free sample question bank is the single most authoritative free resource for SQE1 preparation. It is also small, easy on candidates, and easy to misuse. Treat it as your calibration set, mine the performance data, then move to a high-volume bank for the rest of your preparation.
- Browse the official bank: SRA SQE1 sample questions
- Take a free representative quiz: SQE1 quick quiz
- Full 3,500+ question bank with performance tracking: pricing plans
- Other free SQE1 resources: free SQE1 resources guide
- Build the flashcard layer: SQE1 flashcard strategy
- The MCQ technique itself: SQE1 MCQ technique guide
- Strategic prioritisation: SQE1 hardest subjects ranked
- Where the difficulty actually lives: SQE1 high-yield topics
The candidates who use the SRA bank well treat it as a 220-question calibration tool, not a 220-question test. Walk slowly through it, mine the data, and move on with sharper eyes.