IELTS Speaking Part 3: Government and society
The theme where a political speech is most tempting and most costly.
Whether you can discuss policy without arguing. The examiner is scoring your English, and an answer delivered with heat is almost always less fluent and less structured than one delivered with distance.
Questions you can expect
Longer answers than Part 1 — thirty to forty-five seconds each. The examiner may disagree with you, which is the format working as intended.
- What are the most important things a government should spend money on?
- Should people be required to vote?
- Do laws change quickly enough as society changes?
- How much should the state help people who are struggling?
- Are rules more effective than education in changing behaviour?
- Should local communities have more power over local decisions?
- Do people trust their governments less than in the past?
- How can societies become fairer?
How to build an answer here
- Rank rather than choose on the spending question — health, education, infrastructure — and give a reason for the order.
- Argue about mechanisms, not parties. Whether compulsory voting works is a question about incentives, not politics.
- Take the opposing view seriously in one sentence before your own. This theme punishes one-sidedness more than any other.
- Stay calm and slow. Fluency drops fastest when you are arguing rather than explaining.
Language this theme needs
Part 3 is scored on whether you can generalise and speculate without overstating. These are the phrases that do that work in this particular area.
prioritise
the key verb for the spending questions
a safety net
the standard metaphor for state support
in principle
for agreeing with an idea but not its execution
there's a balance to strike between
the central construction of this theme
lag behind
for laws that have not kept pace
accountable
precise and expected here
The trap in this theme
Turning a policy question into an argument about your own country's politics.
Nobody is marking your politics and heat costs you fluency. Answer as though explaining the trade-off to someone with no stake in it.
Two of these, answered at band 8
Watch the moves, not the opinions — take a position, hedge it as far as you actually believe it, support it, and give the strongest objection its due. Your views can be the opposite of these and score the same. A memorised Part 3 answer is more obvious than a memorised Part 1 one, because the examiner follows up on what you just said and a script cannot survive the follow-up.
What is the most important quality in a leader?
Willingness to be unpopular in a specific direction, I'd say. Plenty of leaders are unpopular by accident and that's just weakness with bad results. What distinguishes the good ones is choosing which fights to have, saying so plainly, and then holding the position when it costs them. The related quality is being able to say what they're giving up — almost every real decision means dropping something, and leaders who won't name the thing they're dropping usually haven't decided at all.
Why it worksDefines the quality precisely, distinguishes it from a superficially similar one, and adds a second quality that follows from the first.
Should voting be compulsory?
I lean towards yes, though not strongly. The case for it is that turnout otherwise skews heavily by age and income, so the electorate stops resembling the population and policy follows the people who show up. The case against is real too — a right you're compelled to exercise is a strange kind of right, and you'd be adding a lot of uninformed votes. On balance I'd take the more representative electorate, but I understand people who wouldn't.
Why it worksStates the strength of the position as well as its direction, gives the opposing case genuine weight, and concludes without pretending the question is easy.
Other Part 3 themes
Children & upbringing
Age distinctions are the whole game — an answer that treats 'children' as one group has already lost most of its marks.
Language & globalisation
You are being assessed in English on questions about English, which makes the meta-awareness worth using rather than avoiding.
Art & creativity
The least prepared theme in Part 3, which makes it the easiest place to say something genuinely your own.
Education
The most frequent Part 3 area, and the one where personal school memories most often crowd out the actual question.
Work & careers
Full of questions about change over time, which makes tense control as important as content here.
Technology & society
Invites strong opinions and punishes them — the balanced answer consistently outscores the alarmed one.
Practise being disagreed with
Oliver pushes back in Part 3 the way a real examiner does — not to catch you out, but because holding a position under mild pressure is exactly what is being scored. That is not something you can rehearse against a list of questions. The first test is free.
This guide is written from the published IELTS Speaking band descriptors, in our own words. For the official wording, see the British Council's band descriptors. MockLive AI is an independent practice tool and is not affiliated with IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge University Press & Assessment.