More than double previous year
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has revealed that next year’s income from the Solicitor Qualifying Exam (SQE) will be a whopping £66 million.
Contained within the SRA’s consultation paper on a draft business plan and budget for 2024-25, the regulator states that income from assessments will more than double from the £30.3 million in 2023-24.
Whilst the exams are currently setting students back £1,798 for SQE1 and £2,766 for SQE2, totalling £4,564, this is set to rise by 5% from September, bringing the new total cost to £4,790.
The income in 2024-25 won’t include this rise, however, with the accounts covering the exams from the previous year, i.e. 2023-24, before the increase has come into effect. The figure will include an earlier, more sizeable, price increase of 11% implemented in September 2023.
Price increases alone don’t account for the growth in income; this is primarily due to a sharp uptick in the number of people taking the exams each year. This income is spent purely on assessment costs.
Within the consultation the regulator has also stated that it will deliver a year-three evaluation of the SQE, and make the exam available in Welsh from January 2025.
The exams have received significant backlash from students, most recently focussing on a marking fiasco which saw 175 candidates told they had failed SQE1, when they had in fact passed. If that wasn’t bad enough, Legal Cheek later revealed that a number of students impacted by the blunder had seen their training contract offers revoked.