Law Society reaccreditation exam: how to prepare and what to expect

As promised, I have taken the Law Society’s Immigration and Asylum senior caseworker reaccreditation exam. I passed but definitely have some notes on where a couple of questions could be improved (Law Society – call me!). Below I explained a bit more about how it works and have set out some hopefully useful tips. Much of this will be obvious to many but I certainly think a refresher is a good thing (we only do this every three years after all).

Preparation using Free Movement

The first thing I did was all of the training we linked to in this post on the reaccreditation process. I am not a very busy legal aid lawyer and I found it difficult trying to study and get my job done at the same time. So I do realise this is easier said than done but if you can carve out a day or two for studying and taking the exam (emails/Slack etc all switched off) then this will be really beneficial, not just for the exam but for your practice in general (I found it good to sit down and properly refresh myself on various topics). Ideally, employers should take the lead on facilitating this time and space for their staff.

If you do not have the time to go through all of the training, or feel that you don’t need it (which I think will be reasonable for many), then the minimum I would recommend is to take our multiple choice test available at the end of each of the training courses (you can navigate straight to this within the courses by choosing “View course modules” then scrolling down, e.g. here is the one for judicial review). Doing practice multiple choice questions is helpful for remembering things like the importance of reading the questions properly (a mistake I made on the very first practice question I did – a useful lesson!).

Law Society materials and practice questions

I also read the reaccreditation application form guidance notes to prepare. This says that:

Prior to undertaking the reaccreditation process you must familiarise yourself with the following:
1. IAA Reaccreditation Guidance notes
2. Candidate’s Guidance
3. Examination rules
4. Individual Accreditation Guidance Notes

No links are provided to these documents or instructions as to where to find them. I have added in the link to the reaccreditation guidance above and you can find the last three here.

The candidate’s guidance document has a more detailed explanation at pages 14 to 19 of what senior caseworkers are supposed to know, and therefore what the exam may cover. This is useful and you should check it to see if there are any areas you may particularly need to brush up on.

The most helpful document provided is the examination guide which has sample multiple choice questions at 19 to 24. I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to look at and attempt these so you get used to the style of questions that will be on the actual exam. It is a bit unfortunate that no answers are provided that I can see, so I have no idea whether I answered them correctly or not.

I thought about setting out the sample questions with (my) answers here but they are quite long and I think it is more useful for people to go and do them themselves. The format of the questions is often that several different options will be given at the end of a short scenario. For example, this is from sample question 3 (I have omitted the scenario description):

Which of the following statements is/are correct?

(i) The Competent Authority must make a positive Conclusive Grounds decision if, when deciding whether Hao is or is not a victim of trafficking, it suspects but cannot prove that Hao is a victim of trafficking.
(ii) The Competent Authority must make a negative Conclusive Grounds decision if it concludes beyond all reasonable doubt that Hao is not a victim of trafficking.
(iii) It is in Hao’s best interests to provide a witness statement explaining, amongst other things, why his first asylum claim was made on an incorrect basis.
(iv) You must open a new Legal Help file because Hao has been released from detention.

You need to say which combination of these options is correct, from a choice of four answers. With this style of question I found it helpful to start by writing down the options that I was completely confident were correct or incorrect, I then used that to eliminate some of the obviously wrong answers.

What I would say is that on question 5 of the sample questions, there was no apparent correct answer for me after I did this. Out of desperation I went away and looked at the country policy and information notes on China on modern slavery, which I am not ashamed to say I do not know by heart. It was only when I did this that I was able to answer the question (presumably correctly). So do be aware that you may need additional information that is not provided within the question.

The exam

You access the exam via the Law Society’s learning portal.

The exam is two hours long, you may not need all of that, I finished in an hour and a half and decided just to submit. There is a very useful timer that runs at the top of the screen counting down your two hours. If you run out of time the exam will automatically submit itself.

There are 30 questions, so you should aim to spend no more that four minutes per question. The pass mark is 70% which means you must get at least 21 questions correct.

I am obviously not allowed to tell you anything about the contents of the exam.

The examination rules state:

3. Concerns with questions
If you are uncertain about the facts or believe that there is an inaccuracy in the paper, you should continue to answer the question(s) and explain the reason for your assumptions in the answer. Please note that if an error is found in the paper, this will be dealt with during the marking and moderation process, and you will not be penalised.

Those have been drafted for the accreditation exam, not our reaccreditation exam and unfortunately there is no way to raise any such concerns with the reaccreditation paper during the exam (and as mentioned, I do have two which I think should be addressed quite urgently).

Conclusion

Good luck!