Gateway skill · Foundation skill 6 of 6
Planning
Idea generation gets you a small set of genuinely different ideas. Planning is the next step: turning that set into a position, exactly two ideas, and one support each — an essay you can write straight through, without stopping mid-paragraph to figure out what comes next.
15–20 min · 5 drills · Task 2
Before you start
Quick drill
Before you plan, decode the question and know your position — retrieval check.
Some people think final exams should be replaced by continuous assessment throughout the school year. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
What must your plan lock in first, before you think of any ideas?
Three decisions, five minutes
Every major IELTS resource — Cullen, Simon, British Council, IELTS Liz — disagrees on the exact minute count, but agrees on the shape: plan before you write, and keep the plan small enough to actually finish. Five minutes out of forty is not lost time. An unplanned essay almost always costs more than five minutes in stalling and backtracking.
1. Position
Decode the operation. Commit to one answer. Nothing else in the plan makes sense before this.
2. Two ideas
Exactly two. Distinct from each other. Not four half-developed ones, and not one repeated twice in different words.
3. One support each
A concrete situation or example, not a restatement or a judgment. If you can’t picture it, it’s too broad to write from.
Once these three exist, the introduction and conclusion write themselves from the position, and each body paragraph writes itself from one idea plus its support.
Practice 1 of 5
Select all that apply
From five candidate ideas, select the two you would actually plan an essay around.
The rule
A Task 2 plan needs exactly two main ideas — not one (too thin for two body paragraphs) and not four (no time to develop any of them, and the extra ones tend to resurface later as an unplanned "new idea" in the conclusion). Pick the two that are distinct from each other, on-topic, and specific enough that you could immediately think of one example for each.
Position: largely agree that final exams should be replaced by continuous assessment.
Select the two ideas you would build body paragraphs around.
What usually goes wrong before the writing even starts
1. No plan at all
Weak
“Reading the question once, then starting the introduction immediately, deciding the structure sentence by sentence while writing.”
Feels faster in the moment. Almost always costs more time than it saves — through stalling mid-paragraph or drifting off the position stated in the introduction.
Strong
“Reading the question, then spending about 5 minutes deciding position, two ideas, and one support each before writing a single sentence of the essay.”
Slower to start, faster to finish — every paragraph already knows what it's for.
2. Three or four ideas, none of them developed
Weak
“Idea 1: reduces pressure. Idea 2: reflects ability better. Idea 3: fairer to different learning styles. Idea 4: teachers can give feedback sooner.”
Four body paragraphs in forty minutes means roughly seven minutes each — not enough to develop any of them with a real example.
Strong
“Idea 1: reduces pressure. Idea 2: reflects ability better.”
Two ideas, fully developed, beats four ideas mentioned in passing.
3. A plan that gets abandoned mid-essay
Weak
“Plan says idea 2 is 'reflects ability more accurately' — but while writing paragraph 2, a new thought about hiring more counsellors gets added because it 'feels relevant.'”
An idea that occurs to you while writing was never tested against the position or the word count. It is exactly how a new idea ends up unplanned in the conclusion.
Strong
“Paragraph 2 stays on 'reflects ability more accurately' from first sentence to last, even if a more interesting idea occurs mid-paragraph.”
Save the new thought for a different essay. This one already has its two ideas.
Practice 2 of 5
Quick drill
Spot the planning habit most likely to cause a rushed or unfinished essay.
Think about your own last practice essay: did you plan before writing, or start writing straight away? One line.
Which habit is the strongest predictor of running out of time on Task 2?
The two slots change shape with the question
“Two ideas” does not always mean two reasons for one opinion. What fills the two slots depends on the operation you already learned to decode.
| Agree/disagree | Two reasons that support the one position you chose. |
| Discuss both views + opinion | One idea per view, plus your opinion woven through both or stated separately. |
| Advantages/disadvantages | One advantage, one disadvantage — each with its own support. |
| Outweigh | The weaker side gets one idea; the stronger side gets one idea plus the judgment of why it wins. |
| Problems/solutions | One cause or problem, one matching solution — paired, not listed separately. |
| Two-part question | One idea answers the first question, one idea answers the second. |
Practice 3 of 5
Quick drill
Choose a support point specific enough to actually plan a paragraph around.
Idea: continuous assessment reflects a student's ability more accurately than a single final exam.
Which support is specific enough to write a full body paragraph from?
On the computer-delivered test
Every test centre gives you paper and a pencil for rough notes — planning on paper always works. The computer-delivered test adds a second option: typing the plan directly into the answer box, above the essay.
Paper plan
Nothing to delete, nothing to accidentally leave in the answer box. Some test-takers find it faster to jot three short lines than to switch typing context.
On-screen plan
Type the plan at the top of the answer box, then delete it before submitting, or write the essay below it and delete upward once finished. Either works — the risk is forgetting to delete it, which can affect the word count and the read.
Whichever you choose, decide before the test, not during it — deciding live is one more thing competing with your five planning minutes.
Practice 4 of 5
Judgment drill
Judge whether a finished essay actually followed its own plan.
Plan: Position — largely agree. Idea 1 — reduces pressure of a single high-stakes exam. Idea 2 — reflects ability more accurately. Finished essay body: Paragraph 1 argues continuous assessment reduces pressure. Paragraph 2 argues it reflects ability more accurately, but adds two extra sentences proposing that schools should also hire more counsellors to support struggling students.
Does the finished essay match its own plan?
Practice 5 of 5 — new topic
Quick drill
Plan a new question from scratch: position, two ideas, one support each — under five minutes.
Governments should spend public money on museums and the arts, rather than on more practical needs such as housing or transport. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Set a 5-minute timer if you can. Write your own plan first: position, two ideas, one support each. Then compare it against the option below.
Which plan is ready to write from immediately, with no further thinking required mid-essay?
60-second check
Use this in the real exam, not just here — it fits inside the five minutes.
Before you write
- □ Operation decoded, position chosen
- □ Exactly two ideas, genuinely different from each other
- □ One concrete support written down for each
After you finish
- □ Every paragraph still matches its planned idea
- □ No idea from the plan is missing, no idea outside it was added
- □ On-screen plan deleted, or ignored if it was on paper