IB English Tutors: What the IB's Own Assessment Data Shows

There are two IB English A courses, not one, and the difference is not cosmetic: Language A: literature asks for 13 works at HL, language and literature for 6. In the May 2025 session, 1.3% of Literature HL candidates were awarded a 7, against 6.3% at SL. This page sets out what the IB itself publishes about durations, maximum marks, weightings and outcomes.

Which IB English A course is your child actually taking?

Before any tuition begins it is worth checking which English A course a student is enrolled on. The IB runs two of them — Language A: literature, and Language A: language and literature — and they are not variations on a theme. They have separate guides, different reading loads, and a Paper 1 built from entirely different material. A tutor who assumes the wrong one will prepare a student thoroughly for an exam they are not sitting. Schools do not always make the distinction loudly, and plenty of parents have never been told there was a choice at all.

The reading load is where the two diverge most visibly. On Language A: literature the IB states that students "study 13 works at higher level and 9 works at standard level". On language and literature the equivalent sentence reads 6 works at higher level and 4 at standard level. At HL that is more than double the number of complete works — 13 against 6 — and it has to fit inside the same timetable, because the IB sets one class-hour minimum for both English A courses: "a minimum of 240 class hours" at HL, and 150 at SL. The gap between the levels is 90 hours, 240 less 150, and that is the whole of the extra higher level provision.

Those hours are not left unstructured. The IB divides the course into three areas of exploration, and the subject brief allocates the time evenly between them: 50 hours to each area at SL, and 80 hours to each at HL. The arithmetic closes exactly — 50 hours across three areas is the 150-hour standard level minimum, and 80 hours across three areas is the 240-hour higher level minimum — which is a useful check that nothing is being quietly held back for revision. The guide also puts a floor under coverage: "There must be a minimum of three works for each area of exploration." Three areas at three works each is nine works, so at HL, where 13 are required, four sit above the minimum and are genuinely the school's choice.

"Work" is a defined term rather than a loose one, and it matters as soon as a parent tries to count what their child has actually read. The guide counts "a substantial section or the whole of a long poem (at least 600 lines)" as a single work. A slim volume of poetry, in other words, may or may not be one work depending on its length. That is the level of specificity the IB applies throughout this subject, and it is the level at which preparation has to be planned if it is going to be worth anything.

Language availability is the last structural difference, and it explains why literature exists as a separate course at all. The IB says the literature course "is automatically available in 55 languages", against 17 for language and literature. Literature is the route through which a student studies their own first language at diploma level, whatever that language happens to be. For a UK family that usually means English on both sides of the decision — but it explains why literature cohorts worldwide look different from language and literature cohorts, which matters a great deal when you read the grade tables further down this page. If your child is still in Year 11, incidentally, the close-reading habits that make IB English survivable are built during GCSE English tuition, not in September of the first diploma year.

How is IB English assessed, component by component?

At higher level there are four assessed components and only three of them happen in an exam hall. At standard level there are three, and only two are exams. The table below is the IB's own assessment outline for Language A: literature, with every duration, weighting and maximum mark taken from the subject brief and the subject guide. Not one of the ten organic results competing for this search publishes a single one of these figures.

One figure in that table is ours rather than the IB's, and we would rather flag it than let you assume otherwise. The IB publishes Paper 1 at 35% and Paper 2 at 25% at higher level, states that "The external components contribute 70% to the final assessment at SL and 80% at HL", and gives the Individual Oral as "30% for SL, 20% for HL". The HL essay is the remaining external component, so it takes whatever is left of that external 80%: 80 less 35 less 25 leaves 20%. The standard level column needs no arithmetic at all — 35 plus 35 is the 70% external share, and the oral's 30% completes the grade.

Raw marks and weightings are different currencies, and confusing them is one of the commonest parent errors in this subject. Add up the higher level maximum marks and you get 130: 40 for Paper 1, 30 for Paper 2, 20 for the HL essay and 40 for the oral. At standard level the total is 90, being 20 plus 30 plus 40. Nobody is graded on those totals. Each component is scaled to its published weighting, which is exactly why the Individual Oral — worth 40 raw marks at both levels, the same number as HL Paper 1 — is worth 30% of the grade at SL and only 20% at HL.

Read the weightings across and one thing stands out. Paper 2 is the only component that becomes less valuable when a student moves up a level. Same paper, same length, same questions, same maximum mark — 35% at standard level, 25% at higher. Everything an HL student gains, they gain in the components around the comparative essay rather than in the essay itself. That single asymmetry should shape how the two years are planned, and it almost never does, because most families have never seen the weightings written down.

It is also worth noting what the table does not contain: any figure we could not source. Where the IB publishes a number, it is here. Where we could only find it for one of the two courses, we have said so rather than filling the cell with something plausible. The grade tables later on follow the same rule, and there are cells in this subject we would rather leave visibly empty than quietly complete.

Why is Paper 1 a different exam at HL and SL?

Paper 1 is the component most often described loosely, including on the previous version of this page. Both levels receive a paper containing two unseen passages. The difference is not how many passages are printed but how many are analysed. The guide's standard level instruction is "Students choose one passage and write an analysis of it. (20 marks)". The higher level instruction is "Students write an analysis of each of the passages. (40 marks)". Same paper on the desk; a different task written on it.

That doubling of output is why the paper runs 1.25 hours at SL and 2.25 hours at HL. Work the rate out, though, and the HL student is not being handed proportionally more time. Standard level allows 1.25 hours for 20 marks; higher level allows 2.25 hours for 40. Twice the marks, but not twice the time — twice 1.25 would be 2.5, and the paper runs 2.25. HL Paper 1 is, in practice, the most tightly timed thing in the course, and at 35% at both levels it is also the largest single component on either route.

Then there is the material, which is where the two courses part company completely. On language and literature the guide states that the paper "consists of two non-literary passages, from two different text types". Not may include, not typically. On literature the passages are literary. A language and literature student who has spent a year practising unseen poetry has practised the wrong skill, and a literature student drilled on advertising copy and journalism has done the same thing in the other direction. This is the single most consequential difference between the two English A courses, and establishing which one applies is the first thing we do in a first session — not because it is difficult, but because getting it wrong wastes an entire term.

Paper 2: the one component that is the same for everybody

There is genuine reassurance available here, and it is rare in this subject. The IB guide states that "The format of paper 2 and the four questions are the same for both SL and HL students, and for both" courses. One paper, one set of questions, 1.75 hours, 30 marks, sat by every English A candidate in the session regardless of course or level. Whatever else varies, this does not.

Only the weighting moves, and it moves in the direction most families do not expect: 35% at standard level, 25% at higher. That is worth sitting with for a moment. A standard level and a higher level student can sit side by side, answer the same question, earn the same mark out of 30, and have it count for ten percentage points more in one case than the other. The 35 less 25 is precisely the ten points that the HL essay absorbs. An HL student who treats Paper 2 as the centre of the course is over-investing in the component that has just been devalued for them.

The task is a comparative essay on two works studied during the course, chosen from four general questions, written without the texts available. Because the questions are general, preparation is not about predicting them; it is about arriving with pairings of works flexible enough to be bent towards whatever comes up. A student who has rehearsed one pairing in one direction is badly exposed. A student who knows two works well enough to argue either side of a question about structure, or place, or power, is not. That flexibility is trainable, and it is most of what a productive term of Paper 2 preparation actually consists of.

The HL essay: a fifth of the grade, with no question paper

The HL essay is the component that does not exist at standard level, and the one over which the student has the most control. The IB sets the length as a hard range rather than a guideline: "At HL, students are required to write a formal essay of 1,200-1,500 words". It carries 20 marks and, by the arithmetic set out above, 20% of the final grade. The student chooses the text and the line of inquiry. There is no unseen material and no invigilator.

That control is exactly why tuition tends to shift this component more than any other. There is no timed hall, no question to decode and no examiner's intention to second-guess. What there is instead is the problem of choosing a question narrow enough to be answered properly in 1,200 to 1,500 words. Most weak HL essays we see are not badly written at all; they are attempts to answer a question that would need a dissertation, compressed into fifteen hundred words that consequently say very little about anything. Narrowing the inquiry is the intervention, and it has to happen months before the deadline to be worth making.

One correction to the previous version of this page belongs here. It said the essay is written on a literary text studied during the course. That is the literature guide's framing — it asks for "an essay on one literary text or work studied during the course. (20 marks)" — and it should not have been presented as though it governed both routes, since language and literature is not a course built only from literary works. We have removed the universal claim rather than replacing it with a rule we cannot quote. If your child is on language and literature, the guide their school issues is the document to check, and a good tutor will have read it rather than generalising from the other course.

What can a student actually take into the Individual Oral?

The Individual Oral generates more anxiety than any other component, and a good deal of that anxiety is manufactured by a myth the previous version of this page repeated: that students speak for around ten minutes with nothing at all in front of them. They do not. The guide describes an outline form that "will allow students to note a maximum of 10 bullet points to help provide" structure, and students bring clean copies of their extracts into the room with them.

The extracts are capped too: "An extract of no more than 40 lines should be selected from each work." So the room contains the student, the teacher, ten bullet points and two short passages. What the guide does not permit is reading that outline aloud as a prepared script — and that, rather than any absence of notes, is the real constraint. The skill under examination is speaking analytically from a skeleton, which is trainable, and which almost no student in the sixth form has had cause to practise anywhere else. Telling a student they must memorise ten minutes of prose is not just inaccurate; it trains the wrong thing.

The timing is fixed and split: "Duration: 15 minutes. (10 minutes: student delivery of the oral; 5 minutes: teacher questions)". Ten minutes of delivery against a maximum of ten bullet points works out at roughly a minute a point, which is probably the single most useful planning number on this page. The oral is marked out of 40 — more raw marks than Paper 2 carries, earned in a quarter of an hour — and every oral is recorded. A sample of those recordings goes to the IB rather than all of them, so the standard applied is not purely local; but nor is every oral re-marked externally, and it is worth being accurate about which of those two things is true.

What do IB English grades actually look like?

This is the part no competing page carries. The IB publishes a provisional statistical bulletin for each session, and the May 2025 edition gives the full grade distribution for every subject at every level. Below are all four English A routes, printed in the column order the bulletin itself uses: students entered, mean grade, the percentage awarded no grade, then the percentage awarded each grade from 1 to 7.

Start with the headline finding. English A: literature at higher level had 30,221 candidates, a mean grade of 4.6, and awarded a 7 to 1.3% of them. Literature at standard level had 5,733 candidates, a mean of 5.1, and 6.3% sevens. Divide 6.3 by 1.3 and you get 4.8: a standard level literature candidate in that session was almost five times as likely to be awarded a 7 as a higher level one. Combine the top two grades and the same picture holds — 28.0 plus 6.3 is 34.3% at SL, against 15.8 plus 1.3, or 17.1%, at HL. Almost exactly double.

Language and literature sits between the two and moves far less between its levels. At higher level: 43,295 candidates, a mean of 4.8, and 21.3 plus 3.9, or 25.2%, awarded a 6 or a 7. At standard level: 31,173 candidates, a mean of 4.9, and 24.8 plus 4.5, or 29.3%. The distance between its levels is 0.1 of a mean grade. On literature the same distance is 0.5, being 5.1 less 4.6. Whatever is happening at higher level literature is specific to that route rather than a general property of taking English at HL.

Two cautions before anybody makes a decision on the strength of this. First, these are not comparable populations. Literature HL took 30,221 entries against 5,733 at SL, more than five times as many, and the two routes attract different students in different school systems. Nothing in that data says literature HL is a harder syllabus; it says its cohort scored lower. Second, read it against the session as a whole: the May 2025 diploma results were an 81.3% pass rate, a 4.9 mean grade and 30.5 mean total points. Literature HL's 4.6 is 0.3 below that whole-diploma mean, and literature SL's 5.1 is 0.2 above it. It is also worth seeing the scale: the four routes together took 110,422 entries — 43,295 plus 31,173 plus 30,221 plus 5,733 — and literature SL is 5.2% of that. It is a small and unusual cohort, and small unusual cohorts should be read carefully.

One more caveat, on currency. The May 2025 bulletin is the most recent English A distribution we can actually read at source. The newer bulletins the IB has published are image-only PDFs with no extractable text layer, so we have not used them rather than transcribing figures we cannot verify. When that changes, this table changes, and the date above it will change with it.

How many UK students sit IB English, and what is changing?

The diploma is a small qualification in the United Kingdom, and that has practical consequences for families. The May 2025 bulletin records 5,064 students entered from the UK. Spread across every subject, every school and both English A routes, that is a cohort small enough that many UK schools run English A with one or two teachers and no specialist backup at all. It is also why UK-specific IB support is thin on the ground compared with the enormous market serving the domestic exam boards.

Set that against the IB's own description of its scale — a community of "180,000+ DP and CP students across 5,500+ schools in more than 160 countries" — and the UK entry looks like what it is: a minority route inside a global system. Revision guidance written for the English exam boards does not transfer to it, which is the trap families fall into when they buy generic English revision material off a shelf. Families weighing the diploma against domestic qualifications at sixth form entry should know that the support market looks completely different on each side of that decision, and that the difference is worth factoring in before the choice is made rather than after.

There is one change coming that is worth watching without panicking about. The IB states that it "will deliver both paper and digital examinations in the DP and CP starting with a small number of subjects in 2026". It does not name those subjects. We are not going to imply English A is among them, because the IB has not said so. Nor is there any published revision to the Language A model — the current course structure stands. Anyone telling you the English A syllabus is about to change is guessing, and you should ask them where they read it.

Where are the marks lost, and how does tuition address each component?

Now that the weightings are on the page, this argument makes itself rather than having to be asserted. At standard level the Individual Oral is 30% of the grade — larger than anything except the two written papers, and the component most students prepare last. At higher level the two pieces of work produced outside an exam hall, the HL essay at 20% and the oral at 20%, come to 40% between them, which is more than Paper 2 is worth at that level. On both routes, a substantial share of the grade is decided long before the exam timetable is published.

So we sequence tuition by weighting rather than by the school's calendar. For a standard level student that usually means the oral first, because 30% is at stake and because the skills it builds — close reading of a 40-line extract, arguing coherently from a ten-point skeleton — transfer directly into Paper 1, which is worth another 35%. For a higher level student it means the essay and the oral run in parallel through the first year, so that the final months belong to the two papers rather than to a late scramble for a line of inquiry that was never narrow enough to begin with.

For the papers themselves the method we use is textual anchoring: a small number of passages from each work, known well enough to be quoted accurately and used flexibly, rather than a general familiarity that produces general essays. Paper 2 rewards this most, because the texts are not in the room and the questions are deliberately broad. Our tutors are subject specialists who have taught the diploma and know which guide governs which course. Sessions are one to one, online or in person. Families who need support across the rest of the diploma can see the full range of subject tuition, and those still comparing the diploma with A-level tuition usually want both routes mapped out before they commit to either.

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