SQE1 Trusts Law: An Honest Overview of What's Tested

Trusts has a reputation for being abstract, and a fair amount of the free material written about it online repeats the same few definitions without applying them to anything. The subject is more concrete than its reputation suggests, once you separate what actually gets tested from what merely gets defined in a textbook chapter heading.

The three certainties do most of the work

Almost every question about whether a trust has been validly created reduces to the same enquiry, set out in Knight v Knight (1840) 3 Beav 148: is there certainty of intention, certainty of subject matter, and certainty of objects. The exam value is in the failure modes, not the definitions.

• Uncertain intention usually looks like precatory wording, a hope or wish rather than a binding instruction, dressed up to look like a trust.
• Uncertain subject matter usually looks like a gift of “the bulk of my estate” or an unallocated share of a larger fund, where what is actually held on trust cannot be pinned down.
• Uncertain objects usually looks like a class of beneficiaries so vaguely described that it is not possible to say with certainty whether a given person falls inside or outside it.

The consequence of failure also matters, and differs depending on which certainty fails and what kind of trust was intended, which is exactly the kind of detail a single-best-answer question tests: not whether you know the three certainties exist, but what happens to the property when one of them is missing.

Constitution and the limits of equity’s assistance

A trust also has to be properly constituted: the trust property must actually be transferred to the trustees, or the settlor must have done everything within their power to effect that transfer. The recurring exam trap is the gap between an intention to benefit someone and an imperfectly constituted gift. Equity’s general position, often summarised as “equity will not perfect an imperfect gift” and “equity will not assist a volunteer”, is tested through fact patterns where a well-meaning settlor has simply not finished the paperwork.

Trustees’ duties, in practice

Once a trust exists, trustees are subject to duties that are best understood as answers to a practical question: what is a trustee required to do with someone else’s property that they do not personally benefit from. The duty of care, the duty to act in the beneficiaries’ best interests, and the duty to invest properly are tested through scenarios where a trustee has done something that looks reasonable in isolation but breaches one of these duties in context.

Where free online material tends to fall short

Search for “SQE1 trusts questions” and most of what surfaces is either a raw set of lecture notes uploaded to a document-sharing site, or a short, generic quiz with no citation behind the answer. Neither tells you why a distractor is wrong, which is the actual skill the exam is testing.

Our Trusts section is built the other way round: every question carries the authority that makes the correct answer correct, and an explanation of why each of the other four options fails. A free account unlocks the first section.