How many hours does it really take to move an IELTS band?

Every week someone asks how many lessons it takes to get from 6.0 to 7.0. The honest answer is that hours are the wrong unit, because two students with the same number of hours can end up a full band apart.

What moves a band is corrected output. Not listening to explanations, not reading strategy lists: writing essays that get marked, and speaking for two minutes on a topic you did not choose, then hearing exactly what an examiner would have taken marks off for.

As a rough guide, a motivated student moving from 6.0 to 7.0 usually needs ten to twelve weeks of three lessons a week, with one marked essay and two recorded speaking parts every week. Moving from 5.0 to 6.0 is often faster, because the gaps are more obvious. Moving from 7.0 to 8.0 is slower and much more about precision.

The two things that shorten the timeline are both unglamorous. The first is fixing the same three mistakes until they stop appearing, rather than collecting new tips. The second is doing the writing under time pressure from week one, because most band 6 essays are band 7 essays that ran out of time.

The two things that lengthen it are also predictable: practising only the sections you are already good at, and taking the test before the writing is stable, which usually costs a month and an entrance fee.

If you have a deadline, tell us in the trial lesson. We will say whether it is realistic, and if it is not, we will say that too.