A level mocks disaster (his words). Any advice for best way forward ?

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DS has always been a high achiever and when he got A star A A offers he didn't think anything of it. But his recent mock results are very disappointing. From a distance it doesn't look like he's on track at all. Even papers he thought he'd done well in were not good and he's always been good at assessing his performance.

He says the problem is exam technique and he's never really had to build up really good exam based revision schedules. He could always hold everything in his head and cram. This does not work for A levels as the content is too vast and he's now gone into total panic mode which isn't helping.

Does anyone have any advice on how to structure the last 2 months and how to talk him down?

I absolutely fucked up my prelims and passed my exams well at school.
My friends and I did a lot of exam papers as prep.
To the point where we started to recognize almost repeated questions.
Some tutoring on exam techniques might help as well.

Best advice my daughter got from a teacher was to go through everything in the syllabus and colour code the different bits, green - got it, orange - kinda got it, red - not a clue or lots of gaps. From there, work on the oranges to fill in those gaps. After that look at the reds. It made a massive difference. Other than that they did loads of past papers and asked teachers to mark them and give advice on areas for improvement.

He says the problem is exam technique and he's never really had to build up really good exam based revision schedules. He could always hold everything in his head and cram.

He's answered his own questions.

A sensible schedule of revision, which is organised in a series of building blocks, to help him recall in a logical way.

Then lots of exam practice - old papers are great for this. He should start just working through them, then move onto timing himself.

He should look at old papers, and the marks scheme. He can then allocate time according to the return on marks.

He should ALWAYS spend the first 5 minutes of any timed exam reading through the paper, and planning his time allocation.

Even if they haven't finished the syllabus, he can practice things like working out timing/marks scheme so he's not too nervous to get stressed about them.

Picking up on some of your comments. My elder child did A level geography and it is very much about responding to the key words in the question. Also if it’s a 3 mark question give them 3 things - telling them everything you know will still only give you 3 marks max.