IELTS health essay band 7 sample: government spending on prevention or treatment

Below is a complete IELTS health essay band 7 sample, written for this article, followed by the four criterion scores and the reason each one is a 7 rather than a 6 or an 8. The essay contains no statistics, no percentages and no country data at all — because factual accuracy is not something an examiner scores, and the attempt to produce impressive-looking figures is one of the most reliable ways to lose marks on a policy topic.

That claim is worth stating plainly before you read anything else. An examiner marking your script has no way of checking whether health spending in your country rose or fell, and no mandate to try. What the examiner can see is whether a claim is developed into an argument. A candidate who writes a number and then moves on has produced a sentence that supports nothing; a candidate who follows a claim through its consequences has produced evidence.

The question I wrote for this article

I wrote the prompt myself so that this page is not recycling a past paper or another site's sample:

Some people believe that governments should spend the larger part of their health budget on preventing illness, rather than on treating patients who are already ill.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

This is an opinion task — agree or disagree — not a discussion of two views. The difference matters, because an opinion task requires a position that is visible in the introduction, held through the body, and still recognisable in the conclusion. Since the question is invented, there is no official model answer to it; what follows is my own writing, produced to sit at band 7 and annotated as an examiner would annotate it.

Health funding belongs to a family of Task 2 topics — transport budgets, education funding, policing — that ask you to allocate a limited public resource. These prompts feel dangerous to candidates who have never read a budget document. They are not: the reasoning they require is available to anyone who thinks carefully about cause and consequence.

The band 7 sample essay, with no numbers in it

The essay runs to 268 words, comfortably over the minimum of 250 words that the task instruction sets, and it uses no figures whatsoever.

Health budgets are finite, and governments therefore have to decide where the larger share of the money should go. In my view, prevention deserves that larger share, although a system that neglected treatment altogether would be both cruel and unworkable.

The strongest argument for prevention is that it removes demand before it arises. If a young adult is persuaded to give up smoking, to walk to work, or to attend a routine check-up, the illness that would otherwise have required years of expensive care may never develop at all. Money spent on treatment, by contrast, buys nothing beyond the individual case it pays for; the same condition appears again in the next patient, and the next. Prevention also reaches people who would never arrive at a hospital in time, because it works through schools, workplaces and public campaigns rather than waiting for symptoms to become severe.

Nevertheless, prevention cannot absorb the entire budget, for two reasons. Much illness is simply not preventable: accidents, inherited disorders and the ordinary decline of old age will fill hospitals however carefully a population lives. Moreover, the benefits of prevention arrive slowly, while the patient in the ward needs care today. A government that redirected funds too aggressively would be asking one generation to suffer so that a later one could be healthier, which few voters would accept and no minister could defend.

The sensible position, then, is a deliberate tilt rather than a wholesale transfer. Governments should protect the clinical services that keep people alive, and direct any growth in spending towards the measures that stop people needing those services at all.

Read it once more and notice what is doing the work. Every supporting move is either a hypothetical person, a chain of consequences, or a category of cases. Not one of them could be fact-checked, and not one of them needed to be.

Why this ielts health essay band 7 sample scores 7 on every criterion

The criteria below are described in my own words rather than quoted from the published descriptors, so treat these as an examiner's working summary of what each one is asking for, not as official wording.

Criterion	Band	Why the essay sits here
Task Response	7	The position is stated in the introduction, sustained through both body paragraphs, and restated as a specific allocation rather than a vague balance; each main idea is extended into its consequence instead of being listed.
Coherence and Cohesion	7	Paragraphing is logical and each paragraph has one job; the argument progresses from the case for prevention, to the limits of prevention, to a resolution, with referencing that a reader never has to re-read.
Lexical Resource	7	There is a reliable layer of less common vocabulary used accurately — finite, absorb the entire budget, inherited disorders, a wholesale transfer, the ordinary decline of old age — with no error that obscures meaning.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy	7	Conditionals, relative clauses, participle and contrast structures appear naturally and most sentences are error-free, with only minor slips that a reader would not stumble over.

The arithmetic for a single task is simple: the four criteria are equally weighted, so 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 = 28, and 28 ÷ 4 = 7.0. Your overall Writing band then comes from combining the two tasks, with Task 2 counting double: (Task 1 + Task 2 × 2) ÷ 3, rounded. A candidate who wrote this essay and scored 6 on Task 1 would land on (6 + 14) ÷ 3 = 6.67, which rounds to 6.5 — which is why Task 2 is where repair work pays off first.

It is equally useful to see what keeps this essay at 7 rather than 8. The second body paragraph concedes the counter-case competently but explores it less fully than the first paragraph explores its own. The sentence claiming that treatment "buys nothing beyond the individual case" is an over-generalisation that a stronger script would have qualified. The linking is functional but conventional — by contrast, nevertheless, moreover — where a higher band tends to carry cohesion inside the sentences themselves. And the key nouns prevention and treatment repeat throughout with little paraphrase, which caps the lexical impression. None of that is an error; it is simply the distance between competent and flexible. If you want that gap laid out side by side, our comparison of a band 6.5 and a band 7 essay and the wider guide to reaching band 7 in Writing both work through it, and the band descriptors explained page covers what each criterion is actually measuring.

An example does not have to be a statistic

This is the misconception that damages policy essays most. The task instruction invites relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience, and candidates read example as data. It does not mean data. In argumentative writing, an example is anything that makes a general claim concrete enough for a reader to test.

Four kinds are available to you in the exam room, all of them used in the sample above:

• The hypothetical individual. If a young adult is persuaded to give up smoking… One invented person, followed far enough that the reader can see the mechanism working.
• The chain of consequences. Prevention removes demand before it arises → treatment pays only for the case in front of it → the same condition returns with the next patient. Each step earns the next.
• The category of cases. Accidents, inherited disorders and the ordinary decline of old age. Naming a class of unavoidable illness proves the limit of the argument without requiring a single figure.
• The political or practical constraint. Few voters would accept it and no minister could defend it. An appeal to how institutions behave, which is knowledge every adult candidate has.

If you genuinely know a fact — a policy your own country introduced, a campaign you remember — use it, briefly, and then spend your words explaining what it demonstrates. The mark comes from the explanation, never from the fact. And if you do not know one, invent nothing. A fabricated figure gains you nothing at all in the best case, and in the ordinary case it eats the two or three sentences you needed for development.

Where health and spending essays actually lose marks

Beyond invented data, three failures recur on this topic.

The first is drift into health advice. Candidates who know some medical vocabulary start explaining how illness works, which diet is best, or what treatments exist. The question asked how a government should allocate money. An essay that answers a different question loses on Task Response no matter how fluent it is — and this page, likewise, is about exam writing, not about your health.

The second is breadth instead of depth. A list of six reasons why prevention is good, each given one sentence, reads as an outline rather than an argument. Two ideas developed properly outscore six ideas mentioned. The sample essay above makes exactly two substantive moves.

The third is length mismanagement. The instruction sets a minimum of 250 words and writing under it is penalised, but the useful target is roughly 260 to 290 words. Beyond that you are spending time you need for the position, the paragraphing and a final read-through, and long scripts tend to accumulate the exact grammatical slips that hold a 7 down. You can confirm the task instructions themselves on the official IELTS site.

How to use this sample without copying it

Reading a model answer teaches little on its own; reproducing its reasoning under time pressure teaches a great deal. Close the essay, keep only the four-move plan — position, case for prevention, limits of prevention, resolution — and write your own version without a single number in it. Then compare, criterion by criterion, using the table above as your checklist rather than your impression of how it felt to write.

When that is comfortable, run the same drill on a different allocation topic — public transport, university funding — and then on a band 7 answer on a technology prompt, which applies the same machinery to a subject where candidates are even more tempted to invent evidence. Paste your attempt into Bandly and you will get the four criterion scores back with the specific sentences that set each one — the part of this page you cannot produce for yourself.

FAQ

Do I need statistics for a policy essay?

No. The sample here has none and scores 7 across all four criteria. Accuracy of fact is not marked; development of a claim is.

What counts as an example, then?

A hypothetical individual, a chain of consequences, a category of cases, or a practical constraint. All four appear in the essay above, and none of them could be fact-checked.

What if I do know a real fact?

Use it briefly, then explain what it demonstrates. The explanation earns the mark. If you do not know one, invent nothing.

How long should the essay be?

At least 250 words by the instruction; roughly 260 to 290 in practice. Longer scripts eat your checking time and accumulate the slips that hold a 7 down.

What would make this an 8?

A counter-case explored as fully as the main case, the over-generalisation about treatment qualified, cohesion carried inside the sentences rather than by nevertheless and moreover, and more paraphrase of the two key nouns.

Related reading

• IELTS Task 2 band 7 sample answer: technology — the same machinery on a topic that tempts invented evidence
• Band 6.5 vs band 7 essay — the half band below, scored side by side
• How to get band 7 in IELTS Writing — the four criteria as conditions to meet
• IELTS Writing band descriptors explained — what each criterion is measuring

Official task instructions are on ielts.org.