Getting progressively worse

[Mango04]

My ds is in year 10 at an indie - he’s always been disorganised but this years end of year exams have now shown that he is doing appallingly . He “revised “- but it’s obviously not working and he does/gets very little homework. There hasn’t been one subject where he’s got above 50% and two so far where he’s got a grade 2 gcse mark. School have been good at communicating these bad results with us but that doesn’t help that he’s on target to fail spectacularly. He really is leaving it too late. He must be fairly smart as it’s a selective school and he had to pass the exams ! Does anyone have any good news stories from this position or any ideas as to what we can do over the summer to get him up to speed ? Thanks

I have taught students who have got poor grades in year 20 exams and made good progress once they start working harder in year 11 - best improvement was from U to grade 4. But the ones that don't start working harder tend to obviously stay on the lower grades. So I would say there is time for improvement and it could be massive as long as he changes his attitude and effort levels.

• year 10 not year 20!!

Is he coping at school - does he understand what he is taught, is he able to write down homework and organise his equipment? If not, could have a mentor to help him get these skills up?

I'm fresh from re-reading The Explosive Child so I've got the phrase "children do well when they can" on the brain. In other words, mostly children don't choose to do badly, and it can be quite productive to approach the problem by assuming they need help/support rather than discipline or consequences.

I realise I'm not giving any practical suggestions though, sorry.

My DD1 has dyspraxia, and can't organise her way out of a paper bag.
For GCSEs I micromanaged her revision.
ie
I wrote a revision time table for her, with her input.
I oversaw revision as she wasn't effective doing it on her own.
We mainly ignored her exercise books and went off revision guides as the books were too messy/incomplete/disorganised to be much use.

Over the holidays you could:

• together use revision guides to make revision cards / mind maps for all topics already covered for all subjects. This gets them done and gets him to go over stuff again
• go through his exams (get them back from the school) and see where he lost marks. Was it:

a) lack of knowledge (ie poor revision) b) misreading question c) lack of understanding (eg maths/science) d) not answering question / following expected structure e) poor exams technique eg running out of time ie If he did good revision can he actually do the questions, or is the question answering an issue even with an open book.

Thanks guys, his books are poorly organised despite my best attempts, they get given loads of sheets that they’re supposed to stick in but then end up getting lost so will use revision guides Instead Thks for that tip. He’s not naughty and performs better in class and the end of topic tests he seems to not be able to action this in exams - think he maybe panics and he hadn’t found a revision technique that works School tested him a few weeks ago to see if barriers to learning and nothing obviously wrong but being s teen boy does not want my help - it’s infuriating !

My Ds is also year 10. He is bright but is currently being assessed for ASD. He struggles with homework and revision. He thinks school is for school work and he should not have to do it at home. He also thinks revision doesn't work. He is fortunate that at the moment his grades are still pretty good even though he is not engaging with the work at home. School are giving him one to one study skills support but I don't think he is really taking it in. It is terribly frustrating as Ds has the ability to get very high gcse results but I'm not sure if he will. I know Ds's sen makes it difficult for him but sometimes I just don't know how to get through to him.

If your Ds has had some screening tests and all is looking ok then I guess it's a matter of looking for some study skills that may work for him. Also some techniques that will stop him panicking in exams. I agree with you though, teen boys are can be infuriating!

OP, my DD's dyspraxia wasn't formally diagnosed until Dec y11. She had increasingly struggled as she progressed through secondary.

Partly it was 'masked' in class as she was quite good answering questions then. What let her down was inability to answer open ended questions in tests. She literally couldn't organise her thoughts to formulate answers.

So she ended up having to do English language by numbers where we broke every question into tiny steps for her to do formulaically. Science 6 mark questions were also an issue as she would answer with 1 sentence, so we had to work a lot to get her to understand what sort of information was needed.

This is where you really need to understand whether it is lack of / ineffective revision that's holding him back or lack of ability to formulate good answers (or both).

Agree with pp and he needs to look at where things are going wrong regarding exam technique and revision.
Does he understand what the questions means - eg key words such as explain, describe, illustrate. If he is misinterpreting them he may be losing many marks.
Take a look at past exam papers and mark schemes and see how marks are awarded. I did this with my ds and we had many a - I knew that, but didn't think I needed to write it down! - moments.
How is your ds revising? Flash cards, working through past papers, summarising notes and key points? When I worked in the school library I would see many students with a text book propped up on the desk and this was their revision. Ime revision needs to be an active process.
On a positive note there is still time to organise his notes and books (with your help at first) and find revision methods which work for him.

Are you sitting down with him and helping him revise?

My son is disorganised, has a processing disorder, bright/at a highly selective school. He left his improvement down to the very last minute, but it came (he's finishing his Physics GCSE at this very minute).

I don't know his results obviously but they predicted him a clutch of 6/7s in January (i.e. not good enough to stay on) and was getting half 8s, half 9s in his practice papers over the past couple of months.

It's terribly stressful and to be honest I probably would have sent him elsewhere had I known what I know now. I think in my son's case, he really just found it all boring and resisted the work of flashcards, learning by rote, cracking a maths problem then repeating until it's baked in and so on until he really felt the fire to his feet.

I was hands-off for revision apart from generally nagging him about flashcards etc (everything above).