26 August 2026

What the SRA's current Continuing Competence rules ask of solicitors and firms

Ask a room of solicitors what the SRA requires them to do to stay competent, and you might get one of two answers: "nothing specific since they scrapped CPD hours," or a description of the mandatory ethics discussions currently under consultation. Both answers miss explaining the current regulatory obligation.

The SRA hasn't required a fixed number of CPD hours since November 2016. But "no minimum hours" was never the same thing as "no requirement."

What replaced the old points system is a self-directed reflective cycle that every practising solicitor is expected to follow right now, but the SRA's own monitoring shows a real, evidenced gap between what's required and what many firms do.

What's required today

The obligation starts with paragraph 3.3 of the Code of Conduct for Solicitors: solicitors must maintain their competence and keep their professional knowledge and skills up to date. The SRA translates that into five steps: reflect, identify, plan and address, record, and evaluate. Solicitors are expected to regularly consider the quality of their practice across all aspects of their role, not only their technical legal knowledge, and then identify learning needs from that reflection, plan how to address them, keep a record of what they did and why, and later think about whether it actually worked.

The reference point for all of this is the Statement of Solicitor Competence, which covers four areas: ethics, professionalism and judgement; technical legal practice; working with other people; and managing yourself and your own work. Solicitors are meant to use the Statement as an ongoing career-long standard, not a document they only think about at qualification.

Every year, at practising certificate renewal, solicitors declare that they've kept their understanding of their legal, ethical and regulatory obligations current, addressed any learning needs they identified, and are competent to do their job. Firms carry a parallel duty under the Code of Conduct for Firms to make sure their managers and employees do the same.

Keeping a written record of all this is still not, strictly, mandatory. But the SRA says plainly that it regularly asks solicitors to provide evidence, and it can restrict a practising certificate to supervised-only practise if it isn't satisfied.

The gap the SRA has already found

This isn't a theoretical risk. The SRA has reviewed over 1,000 individual training records since 2023, across practise areas including conveyancing, probate, immigration, family law and landlord and tenant work. What it found was a specific, recurring failure: most records simply listed completed courses, with no explanation of why they were needed or how the need was identified. In its landlord and tenant review, 65% of solicitors gave no rationale at all; in probate, the figure was 47%. In its family law sample, more than 70% of solicitors had no documented ethics learning whatsoever, despite ethics being one of the four areas solicitors are explicitly expected to reflect on.

And the consequences are real. From the 2024 practising certificate renewals, the SRA identified 16 solicitors who failed to evidence they had met the declaration, and it imposed conditions restricting ten of them to supervised practise. The SRA has also said outright that failing to demonstrate reflection can be treated as an aggravating factor in any other action it takes against a solicitor. This means a thin or absent competence record doesn't just fail to help, it can actively make an unrelated problem worse.

None of this is about the 2026 reform proposals. The mandatory ethics discussions and recording requirements currently out for consultation are a separate, not-yet-adopted set of changes. This is the regime that's live today, being enforced today, against evidence the SRA has already published.

Where Breeio can help

Breeio is designed to efficiently cover the SRA's five-step cycle: helping solicitors reflect, turn that reflection into a plan, keep a record of what happened, and record their evaluation of how they’ve developed – all in an efficient, easy-to-use LMS platform designed for professional development and easy-to-prove compliance.

Objectives Setting and Tracking covers the key first step: reflecting on practise and identifying development needs. Objectives can be mapped against the four competence areas, giving a solicitor something concrete to check progress against later, rather than a training record that stops the moment a course is marked complete. Viewed up across a team, the same data gives managers and COLPs early visibility of exactly the imbalance the SRA keeps finding – a heavy focus on technical knowledge, light coverage of ethics and working with others – well before it shows up in a declaration or a regulatory review.

Learning Plans can be used to close the gap between identifying a need and doing something about it. Breeio can build a plan directly from a reflection entry and keep the chain intact: need identified, action planned, action taken, which is precisely the link that's usually missing from the training records the SRA reviews. Because it's a living document rather than an annual one-off, it also matches the SRA's own expectation that a plan should be regularly updated as a solicitor's role and practice evolve.

Breeio’s Reflective Practice tool is built for reflecting on and evaluating learning. Helpful structured prompts aid consideration of the Statement of Solicitor Competence areas, and a regular reflection tempo attached to learning and development events makes for an efficient process rather than something reconstructed from memory the week before PC renewal.

Breeio’s Learning Log is the direct answer to the evidence gap the SRA has highlighted. Rather than a list of course titles, Breeio’s Learning Log pulls together a record of the full cycle, exactly the detail the SRA's own template asks for and exactly what's absent from many records the SRA has reviewed. Held centrally and kept current, it's simple to download the moment it's asked for, rather than something a solicitor must reconstruct under time pressure.

Individually, each of these answers one step in the SRA's own cycle. Together on the downloadable Learning Log, they function as a single connected record — reflect, plan, act, record, evaluate — that a solicitor could hand to a reviewer.

The practical takeaway

None of this requires waiting for new rules to land. The obligation to reflect properly, plan deliberately, keep a record, and evaluate learning is already in force, already monitored, and already producing real enforcement action.

The firms best placed for whatever comes out of the current consultation will be the ones already doing this well today – not because a new rule demands it, but because the existing one already does.

Key Sources:

Solicitors Regulation Authority, "Understanding your continuing competence requirements" and related guidance pages (sra.org.uk);

SRA Annual Assessment of Continuing Competence 2025;

SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors and Code of Conduct for Firms.

Links to helpful sources: