The 20-week SQE1 plan, mapped week by week

Twenty weeks sounds like a long time until you map it against a full-time job, and then it sounds like almost no time at all. The plan below breaks that runway into four phases, each with a different job to do, so you're never guessing whether this is a week for learning something new or a week for testing what you already know.

Before week one: set the shape of the whole run

Start by working backwards from your sitting date, not forwards from today. SQE1 is assessed across FLK1 and FLK2, each a set of 180 single best answer questions sat in two 90-question sessions, and the definitive account of scope and format is the SRA's SQE1 assessment specification, which is worth reading once, properly, before you plan a single week. Book your sitting early enough that the date is fixed and real, because a plan measured against a real deadline behaves very differently from one measured against "sometime in the autumn."

Twenty weeks divides into four six-to-eight-week phases: Foundations, Consolidation, Mocks, and Final review, with a short buffer built into the seams rather than bolted onto the end. If you're working full-time, expect to budget somewhere between 12 and 18 hours a week across the whole campaign, rising in the middle and tapering at the very end. That's a guide, not a rule. What matters more than the exact number is that the hours are distributed across the week rather than massed into a single weekend, because spaced repetition of material reliably beats cramming the same total hours into fewer, longer sessions.

If you want this structure built around your actual sitting date rather than a generic week count, PasSQE's planner will lay out the same four phases against your calendar automatically.

Weeks 1 to 8: Foundations

The job of this phase is a first pass through the whole syllabus, not mastery of any part of it. You are building the scaffolding you'll hang everything else on in the phases that follow, so breadth matters more than depth here.

A typical week in Foundations for someone working full-time might run 10 to 14 hours: four or five weekday sessions of 60 to 90 minutes covering new material, plus one longer weekend session of two to three hours reviewing what the week introduced. The review cadence should start immediately, not after the syllabus is "done." A simple pattern, revisiting a topic a day or two after first meeting it and then again after roughly a week, gets spaced repetition working from day one instead of week nine, and it's far easier to build the habit early than to retrofit it once the backlog is already large.

The failure mode to watch for in Foundations is linear reading with no retrieval attached to it. It's entirely possible to feel busy and productive working through notes or a course topic by topic, finish week eight, and discover you can recognise the material but not recall it under pressure. Recognition and recall are different skills, and SQE1's single best answer format tests the latter. Build in low-stakes self-testing from the start, whether that's closing the notes and trying to reconstruct a topic's structure from memory or working a handful of practice questions on material you covered days earlier, rather than treating question practice as something that starts in week fifteen.

Weeks 9 to 14: Consolidation

Consolidation is where the emphasis flips. You've now seen everything once; this phase is a second, more demanding pass, and it should be driven by your own weak spots rather than by working through the syllabus in the same order again.

Expect a slightly heavier week here, perhaps 14 to 18 hours, because active recall work takes longer per topic than first-pass reading did. A typical week might be: two or three sessions revisiting topics flagged as weak in the last review, one session working mixed practice questions across several areas rather than one at a time, and a shorter weekend session specifically reviewing errors from the week's practice. The review cadence widens compared with Foundations, so you're now spacing repetitions across one to three weeks rather than days, but it should still be scheduled deliberately rather than left to chance.

The key discipline in this phase is letting your own performance data choose what you study next, not your gut sense of what feels shaky. If you're keeping any kind of results log from practice questions, that log should be driving which topics get another session this week, because the areas you assume are weak and the areas that are actually costing you marks are not always the same ones.

The failure mode here is re-reading material you already know well because it's comfortable, while the genuinely weak topics get pushed back week after week because returning to them is less pleasant. Consolidation only works if it's uncomfortable some of the time, because that discomfort is the signal that you're closing an actual gap rather than polishing something already solid.

Weeks 15 to 18: Mocks

By this phase the goal shifts again, from building knowledge to building exam performance under realistic conditions. Content review continues, but it now happens in response to what mock sessions reveal, rather than driving the week on its own.

A typical week in Mocks might run 15 to 18 hours: one substantial timed practice session simulating exam conditions (roughly the length of a real SQE1 session, sat in one sitting where practical), plus several shorter sessions reviewing the errors from that sitting and the ones before it, plus a smaller block of targeted content review on whatever the errors point to. The review cadence here is tighter and more immediate: review the sitting within a day or two while the reasoning behind each wrong answer is still fresh, not weeks later when you'd be reconstructing your thinking from scratch.

Two things matter as much as content accuracy in this phase: question stamina and pacing. Sitting 90 questions in one block, the way the real assessment does, is a different experience from doing twenty questions here and there across a week, and the only way to find that out safely is in a mock rather than on the day. An error log, a running record of which questions you got wrong, why, and whether it was a knowledge gap or a misread scenario, is worth more here than almost anything else you can build, because it turns "I got that wrong" into "I get that category of thing wrong," which is the pattern that's actually fixable.

The failure mode to avoid is treating every mock as a verdict on your readiness rather than as a diagnostic. A bad mock score in week fifteen is data, not a sentence; it tells you where week sixteen's review should go. Panicking about the score and abandoning the review process that would have fixed it is the single most expensive mistake available in this phase. If you want a source of fresh timed questions that isn't the same set you've already half-memorised, PasSQE's mock questions are built for exactly this kind of repeated, realistic practice.

Weeks 19 to 20: Final review

The last two weeks are deliberately light. This is not the phase for discovering new gaps or attempting your hardest practice papers for the first time. It's for consolidating confidence in what you already know and making sure the last few high-value fixes actually stick.

A sensible budget here is 6 to 10 hours a week, well down from the peak in Mocks. A typical week might include one shorter timed session (not a full mock) to keep pacing sharp, a couple of short review sessions on your own error log focusing only on patterns that kept recurring, and deliberately protected rest, particularly in the final few days. The review cadence in this phase is short and light-touch: brief revisits of your own summary notes or flagged weak points, not fresh reading.

The failure mode to avoid is the opposite of the one in earlier phases: cramming new material or attempting unfamiliar practice questions in the last week because it feels like you should be doing more. At this stage, new unfamiliar material is more likely to dent confidence than add marks, and confidence going into a two-day sitting is not a soft factor; it affects how clearly you read scenarios and how calmly you work through 90 questions in a row. Taper on purpose. If something in this phase feels like it's undoing the last eighteen weeks of work rather than reinforcing them, it probably belongs earlier in the plan, not here.

The takeaway

Twenty weeks works because each phase asks a different question of you: first exposure in Foundations, weakness-driven repetition in Consolidation, realistic timed practice in Mocks, and a light, protective taper in Final review, rather than asking you to do the same thing for five months straight. Keep the review cadence deliberate throughout, let your own error data choose what gets revisited, and build buffer into the plan rather than the end of it, so a bad week shrinks the plan instead of breaking it. The candidates who arrive at their sitting date in reasonable shape aren't usually the ones who studied the most hours; they're the ones whose plan still matched a real week of their life in week nineteen.