Help me to get over the fact that year 11 dd is failing to put the work in at GCSE

[fidelix]

I am v stressed at the moment as my year 11 dd is not bothering to put much effort in at GCSE.

She had history today and said it had lots of odd qus she wasn't expecting and couldn't possibly have revised for but these included topics that a) are in the syllabus, and b) were in past papers that I desperately tried to interest in her last night (she has not bothered to look at a single one, even though she plans to do history A Level and supposedly wants to do it for a degree!). I am getting so stressed, as dd refuses to plan her revision, I think still seems to imagine she can get by in most subjects with night-before revision, makes no efforts to look at anything beyond her (incomplete) school notes (even though I've bought revision guides) and didn't even know until yesterday there was more than 1 exam board! (Seriously - she looked most shocked when I told her!). She also seems to think predictions are gospel, and she is guaranteed the predicted grade even with minimum work.

Should add that she at an excellent selective school, where A* and As are common and she got in on exam, so is a bright girl - but her work ethic seems to have vanished.

I'm frustrated and disappointed - she won't let anyone help. I'm sad for her, because she assumes she will get into at least a Russell Group uni, like her dad, and doesn't seem to get that you actually need the grades to get there. She previously decided she didn't want to follow me to Oxbridge - now that dream (mine, not hers) seems laughably far away.

How do those of you who have bright but lazy children, who were high-achieving academically yourselves, cope emotionally with watching your dcs fail to put the effort in? I know she does want to go to a good university, but appears to have no idea they won't just 'know' she's deserving of a place. She just doesn't seem to get that you can't wing it at GCSE. That GCSEs measure work, not brilliance.

I know I need to get over my frustration because it's not helping anyone and that her grades are her business not mine, but I'm not dealing with this well.

Help, please!!!

fidelix ah that's a bit different. I've had a DC very similar with a lot of exasperation on the part of the school. I think at it's height I intervened on a couple of occasions with some very plain talking about how he would waste the chances that he could have if he applied himself even occasionally. It turned out ok in the end but it was a fairly painful couple of years watching him play around, although he was enjoying himself and I do think DC can't work sensibly and solidly all of the time without letting off steam. I definitely believe you can't make DC work unless they want to, so in Y11 I did suggest he visited a couple of really good unis which I knew he'd like, pointed him in the direction of the sports fields and then explained what kind of grades they'd need to see as a standard minimum. Maybe one conversation now before it really is too late and then down nagging tools for the duration of the current exams?

I don't agree with the posters saying a wake up call will be good and she can still do fine, not if she's thinking of a top uni and not now that ASs have gone and the GCSE grades will be that much more important even than they were before (in that all unis will have to rely on them as the chief indicator of suitability for a course and institution, not just the ones that do now).

I wouldn't worry too much about the French. Atm all they have to do is learn stuff off by heart. Ds got an A and he was crap at French. He wasn't taught any grammar at all. He did his set pieces with the help of Google Translate. The grade boundary for A must have been 22% !

I also think you find that you can lead a horse to water, but even if you shove their faces in it, they may not drink. I was like this. Wish I'd worked harder, but there you are. Ds learnt his lesson in Yr 10 when they had to take a few early GCSEs (grrr, ds was 14 at the time...) when he believed his friends who were all blathering on about their not having done any work at all. Yeah, right. Ds went to bed for the day when he got his results and all his friends who had supposedly made no effort got A*s.

As someone else has said, it's better that she gets the wake up call now rather than in two years time. The danger is not that she has a taste of failure now but that she meets her own expectations. If she surprises you now with good results for no effort and then attempts to coast through A levels you'll be in this position again in two years.

Her A level predictions will be based on her GCSE grades and that is the point where she might find that she's not on track for the grades to get into the university she aspires to.

Worst case scenario though, she can take a year out after A-Levels and then apply to uni. So although I agree that Oxbridge may be out without amazing GCSEs, she'd be fine for the vast majority of the others.

Is this lack of reality linked to the school though?
If you are at a top school where (it seems) that most pupils will receive A/A* grades at GCSE and where most pupils who take A levels go to the "top" universities perhaps you are more likely to make this type of assumption than if you at a school with a wider ability range.
My thinking is to take it a step at a time. My Y11 dd knows what grades she needs for sixth form and is concentrating on that stage. Plenty of time to worry about A levels and university later on.
Some sixth forms are still entering pupils for AS levels though. The exams still exist, they just won't count towards the final grades at the end of Y13 anymore.

Sometimes kids do worse by over studying and trying to remember far more than they can manage and end up failing from getting information muddled up, if She's a bright sensible girl don't worry main thing is you not stressing her out just tell her to do her best and leave her to it. Tbh getting all A's in gsces doesn't automatically mean she will get a brilliant job in ten years time anyway the same as her failing all her GSCES doesn't mean she will be sat I'm the job centre in ten years time. Relax and she will too and she will do the best she can.

Buggers - know you're right. But also know she is hoping to go to a good uni and really doesn't want to take a year out. So getting good A Lev els and applying after not so useful as a fall back position.

Her study leave starts tonight so I'm hoping if she's now at home I can at least help to keep her on track and distractions to a minimum.

goodbye - do you know what kind of GCSE grades you'd need as a minimum to get into popular courses at Russel Group unis, if coming from a good school? Do you need an A* in the subject to be studied, if a school subject? Or is there some leeway if the A Level prediction is good enough?

catslife - yes, I think dd's assumptions are based on most of her peers getting good grades. She forgets that many of her peers have v v pushy parents eg her boyfriend is basically not allowed out till after exams and only gets his phone back at 9pm, and only if he's been working hard enough!

join us on this thread for mutual support and virtual wine.

Thank you, kitten! I've been lurking, but you all seemed to have children who did unimaginable things like ask you for help with drawing up revision timetables etc, so I felt a bit inadequate!

I might venture in...

Virtual wine both necessary and very welcome. :)

I think it is the time that you have to let her do things her way, and you can only advice her, but do accept that she may not take your advice. I totally understand your feeling, but I do find it out from my son, that by this age, it is hard to get them do things your way now. My DS1 has been really good at listening to my advice, do things as he was told, but now I can see he already formed his own personality, has his own ways of doing things. I still talk to him, but I doubt he takes much in.

To be honest I think you have to let them take the consequences and hope they learn from it. FWIW I've had three sit GCSE's and not one of them put a great deal of effort in at home (the one who did absolutely nothing has just got his Masters) and they all got their very good predicted grades regardless (nothing below a B) and this was at bog standard comps. Schools do an awful lot of revision anyway so it's not as if the students are sitting exams blind and mine needed to relax and have fun after putting in the effort at school and attending the revision sessions after school. Are in school revision sessions an option for your dd?

One thing worth noting is that sometimes not all parts of a syllabus is covered. For example when I did GCSEs 12 years ago my English class studied Death of a Salesman whereas another class did Of Mice and Men. In the paper the ideal was you choose the question related to the book you've been working on.

I was bright and good at blagging at school and tended to wing exams. Ended up getting 5 Bs, 4 Cs and 3 As. In hindsight, I wish someone had pointed out that was shit compared to what I could have got. The reality was, I went on to college and everything fell apart. I've just this year been diagnosed with adult ADHD which explains everything. But I can look back and see the patterns - yes the reluctance to arrange revision was there, because I found it boring and had never once found it useful. But the other red flag in retrospect was doing everything at the last possible minute to the point I'd get really stressed by it but not be able to articulate why I had left it for so long. Likewise I'm sure my coursework dragged down my grades, because I was just terrible at managing my time effectively for projects like that. Again I'd get stressed/frustrated that I'd run out of time but not change for the next project.

I'm not saying these are the same issues your DD is having but that was my experience, and I would love to go back and change it.

Thank you, BertieBotts. Interesting to read - actually, I do feel my dd is very similar, though whether it's ADHD or something else I don't know. She does really, really struggle with organisation and this hasn't really been allowed for by her school. As in, I don't think her late homework, lack of concentration in lessons etc were all deliberate, if anything the opposite. But it's difficult for the school to get that, because she's obviously academically bright, so doesn't tick obvious dyslexic boxes.

Could it be ADHD? She's a daydreamer, can never find anything even if it's right in front of her, regularly forgets stuff she needs to take in, loses keys/bus passes etc regularly. Does this sound like you?

fidelity; check out dyspraxia. Your DD sounds just like my DS. School called in learning support for him for organisational chaos and a disconnect between his classroom performance and shocking homework. LS teacher thinks he has it and am inclined to agree. Haven't gone down the route of a diagnosis, would have been too late for GCSE , Cambridge educated husband scoffs at "labelling" and general feeling he would use diagnosis as an excuse. Has made me more supportive and less hair teasingly frustrated at why he isn't a neurotic swot like I was though....

Sorry fidelix stupid spell checker..

Please don't worry, easier said than done, I know.
I'm well the other side of it with a bright, but once thoroughly difficult son. Did well in GCSEs, then went fairly loopy. Three sixth form colleges later, one access course and three stabs at different unis, he's finally emerged with a first! Took seven years, but he got there in the end. Just been offered a good job, too.
Nothing I did over the years made a jot of difference to his behaviour, he just had to work it out for himself and want to do it, which he did..eventually. He's now a thoroughly lovely young man (having been quite horrible for years). Do remember saying to him at one point, it doesn't matter what stupid things you do, I will never give up on you, you're my boy. He looked quite shocked. Unconditional love helps them know there is a way back. Also, peer pressure. When they see their mates getting and doing well, it spurs them on no end.
Hope the exams go well. And if they don't, there's always a second chance. Or in my son's case, six more chances!

As long as she gets into sixth form on her grades I shouldn't worry. She can knuckle down then if it is what she really wants. If it isn't then no amount of nagging from anyone will make a jot of difference I am afraid. She has to make her own choices and no-one can tell a teenager what to do!

Yes that sounds EXACTLY like me. I have what is known as the inattentive type, which means that I don't outwardly display hyperactivity (There isn't much research on this - but the top people in the field theorise that it shows itself in what they call "chatterbox brain" or fast thinking and excessive/fast speech patterns.) This type is more common in girls and it's more often missed. I would see if you can push for ADHD/dyspraxia assessment even if you have to have it done privately. Dyspraxia can look very similar - a friend of mine had it picked up when she was doing a PGCE, they pointed out how her essays had good content but the content was all jumbled and in the wrong order and difficult to follow as a result.

Everything was great for me school wise until GCSE because I was generally interested in learning and I feel like the school system up until that point was fantastic for me, I suspect it's different now with SATS but it was very discussion-focused, very little rote learning, often hands on, group work etc. I loved school. It was when I made a sudden change from having everything quite carefully managed and being shown how to put together a longer term project, given short term very highly managed goals etc to basically being left to it and given independence - looking back, other people were able to take the skills they had learned by the teachers' modelling how to handle a long term project and apply them but I can't do that. I didn't know what those skills were and even when I look at guidelines of how to break down and plan a longer term project, in reality, each step of doing that is such hard work that it really stresses me out and I lose momentum. And yes I had a lot of teachers telling me I was intelligent and I "shouldn't" be having problems but I was. They assumed it was laziness but it wasn't. I couldn't explain how or why I was struggling because I didn't know that it was different for other people or how people normally experience these kinds of things (I still don't, really.)

I didn't know that there was such a thing as an inattentive type of ADHD until I read something about it on MN a few years ago. It hadn't really crossed my mind that I might have ADHD before then because I was assuming it looked quite different. But it's actually been pretty devastating on my life, it would have made a huge difference to have it picked up earlier. I'm 27 now and I have three unfinished post-16 qualifications and a CELTA (which I blagged my way into) ...and a son, who will be eight this year (and is also easily distracted at school.)

Having said that, although the diagnosis has been wonderfully freeing, and opened up specific things I can try which help, it wasn't that that made the difference so much as the fact I realised that I was having trouble with things that while are usually hard work, are not impossible for other people and I had to think outside the box and work out different ways of doing things. Whether you seek a diagnosis or not, the fact you're aware that it might not just be effort feeding into this is a huge help.

fidelex - I'd hate for any one to feel unwelcome on there, we are all in it together. It's a thread for people trying to stay sane without throttling their children or barging in and doing their exams for them

Thanks all, especially BertieBotts - such a useful post, thank you. Reading your post even made me wonder if it could apply to me, as I have some similar traits eg talking way too fast and daydreaming (though not as much as dd). But yes, you have absolutely described dd - she is the sort of person you'll be helping her revise for a really crucial test the next day and she'll just break off in the middle (dozens of times) because she's seen something out the window or something just popped into her head or she has to talk about Prom now or she wants to know about what happened on such-and-such an occasion before she was born etc etc. It's quite exhausting!

I'd never even heard of the inattentive type of ADHD before but will now google it.

My dh sounds just like yours and agree with you about the downside of labelling but if it gives me a bit more sympathy for dd and most importantly some techniques that could help, that would be great.

Hope you've found some stuff that helps you now and don't worry, 27 is still young enough you've not lost anything by finding this out late, just maybe delayed it a bit...

OP - not much constructive advice here I'm afraid but plenty of empathy as ds2 is about to start his GCSEs and is making no discernible effort whatsoever.

He's dyspraxic and has always had major organisational problems but is very resistant to any suggestions as to how he might help himself- v frustrating

However if it's any consolation ds1 is proof that it's perfectly possible to wing it at GCSE and still come out with very respectable, if not stellar, results