"More learning happens outside the classroom than inside it." Express your views either for or against this statement.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 340 words) — arguing FOR the statement

A classroom is where we are TAUGHT. It does not follow that it is where we LEARN, and I think the two are further apart than we usually admit.

Consider the simple arithmetic of it. A student spends about six hours a day in class, five days a week, for perhaps two hundred days a year. That is twelve hundred hours out of the eight thousand seven hundred and sixty in a year — under fourteen per cent of his waking and sleeping life. Everything he becomes is formed in the other eighty-six per cent.

Then consider what is actually learnt in each place. The classroom teaches information, and teaches it well: the periodic table, the causes of a war, the method for a quadratic equation. But almost nothing a person needs most is on that list. How to lose an argument without losing a friend; how to recognise when someone is lying; how to be alone; how to keep going at something you are bad at. These are learnt in playgrounds, in kitchens, in failure, and in the long unstructured hours that adults call wasted time.

There is also the matter of how the two kinds of learning stick. What is taught for an examination is, by the honest admission of every student, largely gone within months. What is learnt from consequence — from being cheated once, from breaking something and having to pay for it — is never forgotten at all, because the lesson arrived attached to an experience.

The reasonable objection is that the classroom provides what the world cannot: a structure, a sequence, and an adult who has organised the material so that a child need not rediscover mathematics alone. That is entirely true, and it is why schools exist. But structure is the classroom’s contribution, not a monopoly on learning.

The classroom gives us the tools. Almost everything we do with them, we learn somewhere else.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The instruction is "either for OR against", so take one side and hold it. State it in the opening paragraph.

THE KEY MOVE here is to DISTINGUISH TWO WORDS early — being TAUGHT and LEARNING. The statement is arguable only once that distinction is made, and a candidate who treats them as the same thing ends up writing an essay about whether school is useful, which is a different question.

EVIDENCE lifts an argument out of opinion. The arithmetic of hours in the second paragraph is worth studying as a technique: a simple calculation the reader can check is far more persuasive than three adjectives.

The counter-argument paragraph is compulsory in practice, and the model concedes something real — that the classroom supplies structure — before answering it. Conceding a genuine point strengthens an argument; conceding a weak one does not. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.