SQE2 Ethics and Professional Conduct: What Changed and How to Prepare

If you’re sitting SQE2 in January 2027 or later, you may have seen that Ethics and Professional Conduct now appears as its own criterion in your results. It’s a small change on paper, but it’s worth understanding before you plan your preparation.   What has the SRA changed? As I read the SRA’s information, for candidates sitting SQE2 after 1 September 2026, Ethics and Professional Conduct is a separate criterion under the Law part of the marking. The Law criteria are now: applying the law correctly, applying the law comprehensively, and identifying ethical and professional conduct issues and exercising judgment. Candidates will see a mark for it on their results where a station specifically assesses it, and “N/A” where it doesn’t.   What hasn’t changed? The SRA says the change doesn’t alter the format of the SQE2 assessments or how they are marked, and that Skills and Law remain equally weighted within each station. In other words, the assessments themselves look the same. What’s different is that the ethics element is now visible in your results, instead of sitting inside the Law mark. Why it’s worth taking seriously When a skill is reported separately, it’s easier to see where marks are going, and easier to lose them without noticing. I’d rather you treat it as a habit to build than a topic to cram. I can’t tell you which stations will assess it, and I’d be guessing if I did. What I can say is that ethical and professional conduct issues are part of how a solicitor works, so it makes sense to be in the habit of spotting them in any matter you’re given.   How I’d build it into your preparation Keep a short ethics checklist. Something you can run through in a few seconds on every practice task. For example: is there anything here about conflicts, confidentiality, the client’s best interests, my duties to the court, or being honest and acting with integrity? Run it inside timed practice, not separately. Reading about ethics isn’t the same as spotting it under time pressure. Add a quick scan to your timed attempts and check afterwards whether you caught what the model answer or mark scheme expects. Debrief it. When you review a practice attempt, note separately whether you identified the ethical issue and whether you then did something sensible about it. The criterion is about identifying the issue and exercising judgment, so a flag with no judgment attached isn’t the full picture. If you want to see how I’d approach reviewing a practice attempt, How to Review SQE2 Mocks Properly goes into the debrief in detail. And if you want a refresher on what a strong answer looks like in general, What a Good SQE2 Answer Actually Looks Like is worth a read.   Don’t let it crowd out everything else This is one criterion among several. The issue I see most often isn’t that candidates don’t know the material. It’s that they haven’t done enough timed practice for the exam timing to feel automatic. An ethics scan that takes ten seconds in a timed attempt will serve you better than an extra evening of reading about it. And remember that practice material helps with timing and application, but it won’t cover every topic, so keep working through your syllabus alongside it.   A simple plan for the next few weeks If you’re planning for January, start with the base. Active recall on weekdays, timed practice and a proper debrief at weekends, and add the ethics scan once you’ve started timed attempts. My post on how to plan your prep for January has the weekly rhythm. If you’d like a structured base for the recall side, my Outlines are built for active recall and brain dump sessions. They’re a way to organise your revision, not a replacement for working through the syllabus. Also, be sure to enrol in my free ethics course here.