Month: June 2018

 

I covered two ideas in Part 1: the importance of setting medium-term goals, and when (and how) to start thinking about exam timing.

In this second article, I explain how the right approach to school applications can help to reduce stress, and how to encourage a healthy attitude to failure.

If you’d like more focused exam preparation advice, please see my school entrance exam and interview guides.

 

3) Spread the risk

This advice is for families with a number of local selective schools to choose from.

It’s very common for parents to say that they have decided only to apply to one or two schools in order to reduce stress for their children.

For some families, this will be the right decision. However, over many years as a tutor I often saw how the opposite approach can make things easier

If a child knows that they have very few chances to get into a ‘good’ school, the pressure can be enormous – and counterproductive.

On the other hand, while the idea of sitting six, seven or eight different schools’ exams would inspire horror in most adults, I have seen many children tramp happily from assessment day to assessment day, enjoying the new experience and the break from ordinary schoolwork; and performing extremely well across the board, because the large number of opportunities takes away the pressure from each test.

 

4) Don’t let your child develop a fear of failure

For many adults, fear of failure is a powerful motivation. This is also true for some children; but for most, it quickly becomes discouraging. As I mentioned in Part 1, few children are inspired by long-term goals – but these can feel like a burden.

For this reason, it’s extremely important not to let your child worry about life questions which start: “But what if …?”

Encourage them to feel that success in their exams would be something to be proud of; but on the other hand, however strong your fear that they won’t win a place at your favourite school, keep it to yourself!

Reassure your child that whatever happens, they’ll end up happy and successful and in a good school.

This is especially important if your child is aiming for a grammar, and the alternative is a comprehensive which you don’t much like. Your child needs to believe that the grammar school would be great, but that they will have a splendid time whatever happens. It’s essential to convey this message, even if you don’t think that it is likely to be true.

Protecting your child from a fear of failure will put them in a much better frame of mind to perform well – and make it more likely that your private fears aren’t realised.

 

5) … But don’t get stressed about stress

Despite everything I’ve said, it’s important to remember that a certain amount of stress is unavoidable – and a natural response to an important milestone like the 11-plus.

If you act wisely and help your child to keep it under control, a little worry from time to time isn’t always a bad thing.

 

Robert Lomax worked as a school teacher and tutor for many years. He is an educational author and publisher and writes the popular RSL Educational blog.

© Robert Lomax 2018

It’s understandable that you might feel anxious about your child’s 11-plus exams.

It’s also understandable that you’ll worry about transmitting your own stress to your child.

However, because this concern only adds another layer to your own anxiety, it tends to make things worse for everybody!

Rather than feeling guilty because you’re stressed, and fighting to hide it, you can use some simple strategies to help keep your child calm and happy.

Rather than your anxiety infecting them, it’s quite possible that their calm will rub off on you.

• I’ll explain my first two suggestions in this article, and three more in Part 2 – which will follow soon.

 

1) Long-term objectives – medium-term goals

There are two main mistakes that parents make when encouraging their child to focus on exam practice.

The first error is to concentrate on the exam itself as a motivation for your child.

A test which appears to be just round the corner to an adult can seem a lifetime away to a small person.

If you try to persuade them to do extra work at the weekend because “The exam’s only NINE MONTHS away!” they might work hard in order to please you – but this approach will become less effective each time you try it.

The second mistake, on the other hand, is to swing too far the other way, focusing on very small steps.

It may seem like a good idea to say: “All I want from you today is that you achieve a slightly better mark than last weekend”. But what if this weekend’s paper happens to be a little harder than the previous one?

If they score a lower mark, they may feel that they have let themselves down, when in fact it is quite possible that they are improving.

Besides, we all like to imagine a learning curve which looks like this …

… but in reality, the learning process – for any set of skills, at any age – almost invariably looks something like this:

If you set objectives for your child which are too short-term, the troughs in the graph will feel like failures … and this will make the peaks less likely to happen.

Instead, encourage your child to think in terms of goals which span a period of a few weeks, and which are definitely achievable with a bit of effort: whether this means seeing whether they can score at least 80% in one of their past papers next month, or challenging them to write a story with no more than three punctuation errors before the end of term.

 

2) Don’t set timed work until your child is ready

This is a simple point, but it’s something which so many parents (not to mention tutors) get wrong.

Learning skills, and learning to reproduce them quickly, are two very different things.

Timing problems are usually caused by a lack of confidence with core knowledge or techniques. Trying to work faster and faster tends to make any weaknesses worse – so that, in some cases, children who are trying to work more quickly actually become slower.

Instead, encourage your child to work carefully and in detail, repeating and correcting tasks as much as necessary. (I cover many of the core skills for exam preparation in my entrance exam guides, such as this one for Dulwich College.)

Once they are feeling reasonably confident and the exam is a couple of months away, it’s time to start introducing some fairly relaxed time limits; then building up to proper exam timing in the last few weeks.

It is rarely a good idea to set a child regular timed work six months (let alone a year) before their 11-plus.

 

Look out for Part 2 of this article in a week or two!

 

Robert Lomax worked as a school teacher and tutor for many years. He is an educational author and publisher and writes the popular RSL Educational blog.

© Robert Lomax 2018