Band 9 model answer
A model answer written to illustrate a Band 9 response to this question, with the rubric breakdown and what carries it. Written by us as a teaching example, not a verified exam script.
“More government services are moving online. Is this a positive or negative development?”9
Overall
9
Task response
9
Coherence & cohesion
9
Lexical resource
9
Grammar
The progressive transfer of public services, tax filing, licence renewals, healthcare appointments, benefit applications, from physical offices to online platforms is a trend that has accelerated sharply in recent years. I consider this development broadly positive, provided that the transition is managed with genuine attention to those who cannot easily participate.
The advantages of digital government are substantial and well-documented. Online platforms allow citizens to access services at any hour, eliminating the need to take time away from employment, and they reduce the administrative overhead of maintaining physical infrastructure. The processing of applications becomes faster, error rates from manual transcription fall, and governments gain access to better-integrated data that can improve policy analysis and fraud detection. Countries that have invested seriously in digital public services, Estonia is often cited as a leading example, report significant gains in both citizen satisfaction and operational efficiency.
The risk that accompanies this shift is equally clear. Access to online services presupposes reliable internet connectivity, digital literacy and the possession of compatible devices, conditions that are far from universal. Elderly citizens, those with certain disabilities and people in rural or economically deprived areas are disproportionately likely to find themselves excluded from platforms nominally serving the public. If physical alternatives are simultaneously withdrawn, the most vulnerable citizens lose access to services they are often most dependent upon, transforming a modernisation agenda into a mechanism of administrative exclusion.
The resolution is not to halt digitalisation but to implement it at a pace that invests simultaneously in connectivity, digital skills training and maintained offline channels for those who need them.
In conclusion, the digital transformation of public services is a positive development overall, but its benefits will only be fairly distributed if governments treat inclusive access as an obligation rather than an afterthought.
- •Estonia is invoked as a precise, apt reference point that avoids vagueness without overclaiming invented statistics.
- •The 'administrative exclusion' framing is a sharp conceptual label that captures the risk concisely.
- •The conclusion re-frames the question usefully, not whether to digitalise but how, which is an analytically mature move.
- •The middle paragraph's list of excluded groups (elderly, disabled, rural) is accurate but could be developed with one specific consequence rather than three brief labels.
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