I was researching historic test volumes for a client using the wayback machine. I spotted an announcement from the IELTS partnership that the IELTS test was taken 3.5 million times in 2018.
And today? If we combine figures from the most recent annual reports of the British Council and IDP Education we get a total of about 3.6 million tests. So not much of a change from 2018.
In the same time frame, annual PTE test volumes have increased from about half a million to about 1.1 million. Annual DET test volumes have increased from about zero to an estimated 700,000. And, of course, the long tail of smaller tests we see today wasn’t so long back in 2018.
Some of these numbers require guesswork, but they get to the point of what I’ve been nattering on about for the past decade – the market is getting bigger and newer and more nimble firms are taking advantage of that. Much more so than older and less nimble firms. I realize that I’m being Captain Obvious here… but I guess it is worth stating now and then.