Youth Incorporated Magazine

Success in the classroom comes from many things, including academic ability and resilience. As parents, we can help our children to succeed in school by teaching them transferrable skills and helping them with study, until they are able to do it on their own. If you want to help prepare your child for studying in the UK, follow these four tips. 

Set Up a Study Planner

If you want to get your child in a good routine for studying, a study planner is a great way to start. This way, you and your child can plan your time accordingly, so you have time to study around your busy family life. A study planner also holds your child accountable, which is a great skill for them to learn. 

Being able to plan and sit down at a certain time each day will teach your child how to study themselves in the future. A planner is great way to establish routine too, so that your child doesn’t come home every day and immediately start playing video games without doing their homework. 

Teach Your Child the Importance of Asking for Help

Some children will sit through a class and not have an idea what is going on, but they will be too afraid to ask for help for fear of being bullied or not looking smart enough. Teaching your child to ask for help is so important if you want them to succeed. If they are a nervous child and are worried about asking in the middle of a lesson, tell them to stay behind afterwards to speak to the teacher. 

They must learn how to ask for help, otherwise they won’t be able to study and learn. While you may want to intervene and teach something to them yourself, it is important to give them this independence, as they need to learn how to ask. 

Practice Makes Perfect

One of the best ways to prepare your child for studying in the UK is to practice the tests that are taken. CATs are a standard test across the UK which can measure your child’s academic level and can set them up for what classrooms they will be in as they go through school. The usual classrooms go in different sets, depending on the outcome of these CATs, meaning you want your child to do as well as they can to excel. 

Practicing these tests can help you to discover what your child is good at and what they need more practice with. As practice makes perfect, going through practice tests can help prepare your child for exams and exam conditions. 

Stress That Learning is Important, Not Grades

Many children feel like a failure because of the pressure their parents have put on them to get the best grades. Not every child is academic and for some, managing to come out of school with a few GCSEs is an amazing achievement for them. This doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t put the work in; it is often the case that they struggle with formal exams and learning. 

This doesn’t mean they can’t be successful in life, what is important here is teaching them how learning and studying is essential, rather than the outcome. If they can learn how to work hard, no matter what grades they get, they are more likely to do better in school (and life) and enjoy it. The more pressure on their shoulders, the more stressed they will feel and the harder it will become to learn.

Following these four tips can help prepare your child for studying in the UK.