Learning English is not three hours a week in a classroom.
I tell students this in the first session: progress does not come from the three hours you sit in the lesson. It comes from what you sustain across the week, between one lesson ending and the next one starting.
Two periods, two jobs
The three hours are when someone guides you, corrects your mistakes and points you in the right direction.
The days in between are when you turn what you learned into a skill that is yours. Leave the lesson and put it all in a drawer, and very little of it stays.
Learning English is closer to building a habit than to attending a class. It needs feeding regularly, and it cannot be compressed into a few fixed hours a week.
You do not need to be at the desk daily
What I want from students is not sitting down at the same hour every day, or forcing themselves through exactly one hour.
Some days you manage twenty or thirty minutes. Some weekends you have time and do two hours. Some weeks are busy and you fit it where you can.
What matters is not when you study. It is that your contact with English continues across the week.
The actual numbers
I encourage students to aim for four to seven hours of independent study a week, alongside three hours of class.
It does not sound like much. But hold that rhythm for around six months and moving up a full IELTS band becomes an entirely realistic goal.