Tag: Behaviour & Wellbeing

If you’ve spent any time in a school newsletter, a staffroom poster, or a parenting group, you’ve met the phrase “growth mindset.” It gets used as a kind of magic word — believe you can improve and you will. That version is a slogan, and slogans are easy to be sceptical of, especially once you notice how thin some of the evidence behind the classroom version turned out to be. But underneath the poster-friendly phrase is a real body of psychology research, some of it genuinely useful for parents, and some of it more mixed than the popular version admits. This is an attempt to separate those two things.

What Carol Dweck’s research actually found

The term “growth mindset” comes from the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who spent decades studying how children respond to difficulty and failure. In a 1988 paper with Ellen Leggett, she described two broad beliefs children hold about their own abilities. Some children hold what she called an “entity theory” — the belief that intelligence is a fixed thing you either have or don’t. Others hold an “incremental theory” — the belief that intelligence and ability can be developed through effort and learning. Dweck later popularised these as “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset” in her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and the idea reached an even wider audience through her TED talk on the power of believing you can improve.

The core finding across her early studies was that children who held the more malleable, incremental belief tended to respond differently to setbacks. Faced with a hard problem, they were more likely to see it as something to work at rather than as proof of a limitation. Children with the fixed belief were more likely to read difficulty as a verdict on their ability, and to disengage from a task rather than risk looking “not smart.”

It’s worth being precise about what that research showed and didn’t show. It described a correlation — a link between how children think about ability and how they respond to challenge. It did not, on its own, prove that teaching a child to say “I can improve” causes better grades. That distinction between “this belief is associated with resilience” and “installing this belief in someone will improve their results” turned out to matter a great deal once schools started trying to teach mindset directly, which we’ll come back to.

The part with the strongest evidence: how you praise matters

If there’s one piece of this research that has held up well and is genuinely useful at home, it’s a specific, well-designed study about praise. In 1998, Dweck and her then-student Claudia Mueller published a series of six experiments with children around ten to twelve years old, working with fairly hard problems from a nonverbal reasoning test.

After the children completed the first set of problems, every child was told they’d done well. Then researchers added one more line, varied by group. Some children were told “you must be smart at this” — praise for ability. Others were told “you must have worked hard” — praise for effort. A third group got no extra comment at all.

What followed was consistent across the six experiments. The children praised for intelligence were more likely to care about looking smart than about actually learning something new when offered a choice of tasks afterwards. When they then hit a genuinely difficult set of problems and struggled, they were quicker to conclude they simply weren’t clever enough, enjoyed the task less, and — this is the part that tends to surprise parents — performed measurably worse on a final set of problems than the children who’d been praised for effort. The effort-praised children, by contrast, stuck with hard problems longer, described intelligence as something that could be built up rather than fixed, and their performance held up better under difficulty.

The mechanism Mueller and Dweck proposed is fairly intuitive once you see it laid out: telling a child “you’re smart” attaches their sense of worth to a trait they can’t control and that a single failure can seem to disprove. Telling a child “you worked hard” or “you found a good way to do that” attaches their sense of worth to something they’re actively doing, which they can keep doing even when the first attempt doesn’t work. This particular finding has since been checked and extended by other researchers, including a 2019 study on vocational students that found similar effects of effort-focused feedback on motivation. It’s one of the more robust, replicated pieces of this whole area — which is exactly why it’s worth taking seriously, separately from the bigger, shakier claims that got built on top of it.

The honest part: what happened when this went into classrooms

Here’s where it’s worth slowing down, because this is the bit that tends to get left off the posters. Once “growth mindset” became popular, schools and programmes started running interventions — short workshops, assemblies, online modules — designed to directly teach children that ability is malleable, on the assumption that this alone would lift achievement. Researchers then went back and checked how well that actually worked, and the results were considerably more modest than the popular version of the idea suggests.

The clearest evidence comes from a large 2018 meta-analysis by Victoria Sisk and colleagues, published in Psychological Science, which pooled data from 273 studies covering over 365,000 participants on the link between mindset and achievement, and a separate set of 43 intervention studies covering more than 57,000 participants. The relationship between having a growth mindset and doing well academically was weak overall. And when researchers looked specifically at whether teaching children a growth mindset actually raised their grades, the average effect was small — the kind of effect size that’s easy to detect across tens of thousands of children in aggregate, but not the kind of transformation the classroom posters imply for any individual child. There was a genuinely interesting exception: children from lower-income backgrounds or who were already struggling academically showed somewhat larger benefits than the average student. For a child already doing fine, a mindset lesson on its own didn’t move much.

A separate, very large and carefully designed study — the National Study of Learning Mindsets, led by David Yeager and published in Nature in 2019 — tracked around 12,500 US ninth-graders across 65 schools who were randomly assigned to receive a short online growth mindset intervention or not. This one found real effects, but they were far from universal. Lower-achieving students who received the intervention were somewhat more likely to take on harder maths courses afterwards; higher-achieving students barely moved. Critically, the benefit only showed up reliably in schools where the surrounding peer culture already supported the message — a mindset lesson delivered into a classroom culture that quietly mocked trying hard didn’t do much on its own. In other words, the belief mattered, but it clearly wasn’t the whole story; the environment around the child had to be pulling in the same direction.

Dweck herself has been unusually candid about this gap between the research and how it got used. In a widely read 2015 piece, she wrote plainly that the growth mindset “was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them,” and that she’d watched schools use the language to make children feel good about effort that wasn’t actually producing any learning — a teacher saying “great effort, you tried your best!” to a child who still doesn’t understand the material. She also acknowledged that her own early work “put too much emphasis on sheer effort,” making it sound as if trying hard was sufficient on its own, when what the original research actually pointed to was trying hard with a strategy that changes when the first one isn’t working — seeking help, trying a different method, asking a better question. She named this drift “false growth mindset”: adults who say the right words about growth and effort while their actual reactions to a child’s mistakes stay exactly as fixed-mindset as ever.

None of this means the underlying idea is wrong. It means the honest version is narrower and less dramatic than the slogan: how you respond to a child’s effort and setbacks does seem to matter, praise for process is better evidenced than praise for ability, and a short talk about “believing in yourself” is not, on its own, going to transform a struggling learner. The useful bit was never the belief in isolation — it’s what you actually do around a child’s mistakes, day to day, that the research keeps pointing back to.

What this means for the words you actually use at home

Given all that, the practical takeaway for a parent isn’t “recite growth mindset affirmations.” It’s something narrower and more doable: notice what you’re praising, and shift it from the trait to the process. That’s a habit of language, and like any habit it’s easiest to build with a few concrete swaps rather than a philosophy.

Instead of this	Try this
“You’re so clever.”	“You worked out a way through that.”
“You’re a natural at maths.”	“I can see all that practice with times tables paying off.”
“Don’t worry, not everyone’s good at spelling.”	“That word’s tricky — let’s find a way to remember it.”
“Great effort, you tried your best!” (when the answer’s still wrong)	“You’ve got the method half right — where do you think it went off track?”
“I’m rubbish at maths too, don’t worry about it.”	“Maths took me a while to get too — what part is tripping you up?”

A few things about that list are worth spelling out, because the honest research above cuts both ways here. First, effort praise only works if the effort is actually connected to the outcome — Dweck’s own warning applies at home just as much as in a classroom. Telling a child “great effort” after twenty minutes of getting the same sum wrong the same way isn’t process praise, it’s a consolation prize, and children generally know the difference. The more useful move is to praise the strategy and then help them change it: “you tried subtracting first — what happens if you try adding instead?”

Second, notice that a couple of the “avoid” phrases aren’t about ability at all — they’re about quietly letting a child off the hook (“not everyone’s good at spelling”). That phrase feels kind in the moment, but it teaches the same lesson as “you’re just not a maths person”: that this is fixed, so there’s no point pushing. The swap isn’t to force relentless positivity, it’s to keep the door open — this is hard right now, not hard forever.

Third, be specific. “Good job” and “well done” are fine as warmth, but they don’t teach anything about what worked. “You checked your working before handing it in, and that’s why you caught the mistake” tells a child exactly what to repeat next time. Specificity is what turns praise from a mood boost into actual information.

And it’s fine — expected, even — for this to feel unnatural for a while. Praise for ability is the easy, quick, culturally default thing to say. Catching yourself and reaching for the process version is a habit you’re building in yourself as much as in your child, and it will feel clunky before it feels normal.

Modelling it yourself matters more than the words

Here’s the part that’s easiest to skip and probably matters most: children watch what you do with your own mistakes far more closely than they listen to what you tell them to do with theirs. If you drop a plate and mutter “I’m so stupid,” or throw your hands up over a wrong turn on the drive with “I’m hopeless at directions,” you’ve just given a live demonstration of the fixed mindset — regardless of how carefully you worded the praise five minutes earlier.

None of us are being watched constantly, and nobody manages a calm, growth-oriented response to every mistake they make. That’s not really the goal. What seems to help is narrating your own process out loud sometimes, especially when something doesn’t go to plan: “I got that email wrong — I should have reread it before sending. I’ll check twice next time.” “This recipe’s not working, let me try a different amount.” “I misjudged that, let’s see what I’d do differently.” You’re not performing a lesson; you’re just letting your child overhear how an adult actually handles being wrong — which, done honestly, includes some frustration, not just cheerful resilience.

This matters because it undercuts the exact failure mode Dweck warned about with “false growth mindset” — parents who say the right things about effort and mistakes but visibly panic, deflect, or shut down when they make their own. Children are good at spotting that gap, and they tend to copy the real behaviour, not the stated belief. If you want a child who tries a second approach when the first one fails, the most direct route isn’t a better speech — it’s being a person they’ve watched do exactly that, more than once, including on the days it’s annoying.

It’s also worth being honest with your child about the limits of effort itself, since that’s part of what the research above corrects for. Trying hard at the wrong method for twenty minutes isn’t admirable, it’s just frustrating, and pretending otherwise isn’t kind. The useful message is closer to: “if it’s not working, that’s information, not a verdict — so what do we try next,” rather than “just keep trying and it’ll come right.” That’s a subtler thing to model than a slogan, but it’s the version the actual research supports.

If you’re after a bit more structure for turning this into an everyday routine rather than an occasional good intention, Learnaroo Hub’s parent resources include some practical prompts for talking through homework mistakes without it turning into either a lecture or an argument — worth a look if you want something more concrete to work from than “just praise the effort.”

None of this is a promise that a few better phrases will transform how your child does at school — the honest reading of the research says that’s not how it works, and any advice claiming otherwise is overselling it. What the evidence does support is smaller and steadier: how you respond to a child’s mistakes, moment to moment, shapes whether they see difficulty as something to work through or something to avoid. That’s not a slogan. It’s just a habit worth building, one ordinary Tuesday-evening homework session at a time.

Most parents I talk to have lived some version of the same evening: tea’s going cold, homework’s not started, and someone is guarding a tablet like it’s the last lifeboat off a sinking ship. If the words “screen time” now make you brace yourself, you’re not failing at parenting — you’ve just inherited a version of the problem that was never quite right to begin with.

For years, the standard advice was a number. Two hours a day. One hour. None before bed. Numbers are appealing because they feel measurable, but they also turn every day into a countdown, a negotiation, and eventually a row. The reassuring part, backed by the people who actually advise the UK government on this, is that the number was never really the point.

What UK guidance actually says now

In February 2019, the UK’s four Chief Medical Officers published their commentary on screen time and social media, commissioned from researchers at University College London who had reviewed the existing evidence. Their conclusion was more useful than it first sounds: the research simply wasn’t strong enough to justify a specific hourly limit for school-age children. So instead of a countdown clock, they framed their advice around three questions a family can keep coming back to — what children are doing on a screen, when they’re doing it, and who they’re doing it with.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health backed the same position, making the point that there isn’t good evidence screen time is inherently harmful in itself — what matters is whether it’s crowding out the things that keep a child well: sleep, physical activity, time with other people, and schoolwork. The threshold to watch for isn’t a clock running out; it’s screen use starting to squeeze out everything else.

That doesn’t mean the guidance is a free-for-all. Within the “when,” there are some genuinely concrete anchors: keep phones and tablets away from the table at mealtimes, build in a break from screen-based activity roughly every two hours rather than sitting through one long unbroken stretch, and try to keep the run-up to bedtime screen-free so sleep isn’t disrupted. Worth flagging, because it trips people up: that “break every two hours” guidance is about pacing continuous use, not a two-hour daily ceiling — you’ll still see some NHS-linked local health pages quote a rough two-hour daily figure for older children, but the CMOs themselves were explicit that this isn’t built on strong evidence, which is exactly why the official framework talks about what, when and who instead of a total.

For the very youngest, there’s a bit more specificity, because the evidence base for babies and toddlers is different. UK guidance aligned with the World Health Organization suggests avoiding screen time altogether under the age of two, other than video calls with family, and capping it at around an hour a day for two- to four-year-olds — with the general steer being that less is better at that age, since this is when speech, attention and social skills are developing fastest.

None of this tells you exactly what to do on a wet Tuesday when you need twenty minutes to make dinner. It’s meant to be a set of questions, not a rulebook — which is honestly more work upfront, but it’s also why it fits real family life better than a stopwatch ever did.

What the evidence actually says to watch for

If a strict number isn’t the answer, what should you actually be paying attention to? Three things keep coming up across the research, and none of them require you to track minutes on a chart.

Sleep

This is the area with the clearest evidence, and it’s worth taking seriously. Screens emit light weighted towards the blue end of the spectrum, and light in that range suppresses melatonin, the hormone that signals to the brain it’s time to sleep. Some research suggests children’s eyes are more sensitive to this than adults’ — their pupils let in more light, and studies have found evening light exposure suppresses melatonin more strongly in children than in grown-ups. A large US study using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development project found that bedtime screen activities — watching video, gaming, texting, scrolling social media — were consistently linked to children taking longer to fall asleep, sleeping for less time overall, and having more disrupted sleep.

The practical upshot isn’t complicated, even if it’s not always easy to enforce: screens out of bedrooms overnight, and a genuine wind-down period beforehand where the last thing your child’s brain is doing isn’t a fast-paced game or an infinite scroll. A charging point on the landing or in the kitchen, rather than a bedroom socket, solves more of this than any app-based time limit does.

What’s being displaced

Screen time itself isn’t the enemy — but it does occupy hours that would otherwise go somewhere else, and researchers call this the displacement effect. A longitudinal study following children in Bristol primary schools from Year 1 through to Year 4 found real shifts in the balance between screen-viewing and physical activity as children got older, with parents themselves noticing screens quietly taking up more of the time that used to go on active play. That matters given that only around four in ten children in the UK currently meet recommended physical activity guidelines. Separately, research on toddlers has found that time spent on screens can displace peer play specifically — the rough-and-tumble, turn-taking, negotiate-who-goes-first kind of play that does a lot of the early work on social skills — and studies on preschoolers have linked heavier screen use to fewer of the shared reading and back-and-forth conversations with parents that build language.

None of this means every hour of screen time is stolen from somewhere important. It means it’s worth occasionally asking what a particular chunk of time would otherwise have been — outdoor play, a board game, a conversation in the car — rather than treating all screen use as equivalent to all other screen use.

Content and company

This is the “what” and the “who” of the CMO framework, and it’s where a lot of the real safeguarding conversation sits. Research consistently draws a distinction between passive screen use — scrolling a feed, watching autoplay video after autoplay video — and active or interactive use, such as a video call with grandparents, a creative app, or something genuinely educational. The passive kind tends to show up more often in studies linked to poorer outcomes on attention and executive function; the interactive kind more often shows some benefit, particularly for language.

The “who” matters just as much. Ofcom’s most recent Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes report, published in May 2025, found that 89% of children aged 3 to 17 play games online and 81% regularly watch YouTube — and flagged real parental concern about unsupervised screen time and children gaming with strangers rather than known friends. In the same report, 74% of parents of three- to five-year-olds and 79% of parents of ten- to twelve-year-olds said they worried about their child spending too much time on screens, and 37% of 8- to 17-year-olds said they thought they themselves spent too long on screens — which is a useful reminder that plenty of children are already somewhat uneasy about their own habits, without needing to be told.

Practical strategies that don’t need a fight every evening

Once you let go of the idea that there’s a perfect daily total to hit, the actual job gets simpler: build a few reliable habits into the shape of an ordinary day, rather than relitigating screen time from scratch every afternoon.

Screen-free times and zones, decided in advance

The strategies with the best track record aren’t clever apps or reward charts — they’re boring, structural ones. Mealtimes with no devices at the table. Bedrooms that stay screen-free overnight, for adults as well as children, which also removes the temptation to “just check” at 11pm. The first twenty minutes after school or nursery pickup kept for a snack and an actual conversation before any screen goes on. None of these need to be announced as a big new rule — they work best when they’re just how things are done in your house, the same way shoes come off at the door.

Watching and playing alongside them, at least sometimes

Co-viewing does two jobs at once. It turns passive content into something a bit more interactive, because you’re commenting, asking questions, laughing at the same bits. And it means you actually know what your child is watching or playing, rather than guessing — which matters more as they get older and the content and the company both get harder to see from across the room. You don’t need to sit through every episode of everything. Even dipping in for five minutes to ask “who’s that character, then?” tells a child their screen use isn’t happening in a sealed box you’ve opted out of.

Let them help write the rules

Boundaries that are handed down tend to get tested. Boundaries a child had a hand in setting tend to stick, partly because they understand the reasoning and partly because being asked feels respectful rather than punitive. A short family conversation — when should screens go off, where do they live overnight, what happens if someone’s mid-game when it’s time to stop — turns “because I said so” into something closer to a shared agreement, and gives you something to point back to later that isn’t just your authority in the moment. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has made a similar point at a policy level: any guidance in this area works better when young people themselves have had a say in shaping it, rather than having it delivered to them fully formed.

Separate “for school” from “for fun”

Homework increasingly happens on a screen, which makes the boundary-setting job harder, because the device that does spelling practice is the same one that does everything else. It helps to make that distinction visible rather than assumed: homework happens on the kitchen table or in a shared space rather than a bedroom, the browser tab for the school portal is the only one open, and when the work’s finished, there’s a clear, named switch-over rather than a grey area where nobody’s quite sure if this is still “school time” or now “free time.” That small bit of structure does a lot to stop homework screens quietly turning into an extra hour of gaming by accident.

Be honest about your own screen use

This is the part that’s easiest to skip and probably matters most. Children notice what we actually do far more than what we say. If mealtimes are meant to be screen-free but a phone is face-down-but-buzzing next to the plate, or bedtime stories get cut short because you’re keen to get back to your own scrolling, that’s the model that lands — regardless of what the house rules say on paper.

This doesn’t mean aiming for some unreachable standard where you never check your phone in front of your kids — that’s not realistic and it’s not really the point. It means being willing to notice your own habits with the same curiosity you’re applying to theirs, and being honest when a rule you’ve set for them doesn’t apply to you for no good reason. Children are unusually good at spotting a rule that only runs one way, and unusually forgiving of parents who admit it and adjust.

Not all screen time is equal

Once you’re thinking in terms of what, when and who rather than a total, it becomes easier to weigh up different kinds of screen time on their own merits rather than lumping them all together. Half an hour of curriculum-linked practice — times tables, phonics, a bit of reading comprehension — earns its place differently to half an hour of algorithm-driven video, even though both look identical from across the room as “on a screen.” This is genuinely one of the reasons Learnaroo Hub exists: it’s still a screen, and it still needs the same boundaries as anything else — a stopping point, a time of day, a bit of parental awareness of what’s actually happening on it — but the content itself is built to be worth the time rather than simply designed to hold attention for its own sake. It’s not a loophole around thinking about screen time. It’s one option worth having in the mix alongside the others, weighed honestly rather than assumed to be automatically fine because it says “learning” on the label.

The bottom line

There isn’t a magic number of minutes that makes screen time safe below it and harmful above it, and the UK’s own Chief Medical Officers have said as much. What actually seems to matter is whether screens are getting in the way of sleep, movement, and time with other people, whether the content and company are appropriate for your particular child, and whether the habits around screens — mealtimes, bedrooms, bedtime — are consistent enough that nobody’s negotiating them from scratch every single evening. Get those structural things reasonably settled, involve your child in setting them, and hold yourself to a version of the same standard, and the daily battle tends to quietly shrink on its own.

If you’ve just started building a life around your autistic child’s needs, or you’ve been doing it for years and are looking for a few new ideas, this is written for you. Not for a general audience of “parents of children with additional needs,” but for you specifically, at home, working out what actually helps.

A note on language first, because you’ll notice it throughout: we’ve used “autistic child” rather than “child with autism.” This is deliberate. Surveys of autistic adults consistently show a strong preference for identity-first language (“autistic person”) over person-first language (“person with autism”), because autism isn’t something separate that can be set aside; it shapes how they think, sense and relate to the world. The National Autistic Society uses identity-first language for this reason. Some families prefer person-first language instead, and that’s worth respecting too. If your child is old enough to have a preference, ask them and follow their lead.

Everything below is practical, everyday support, not therapy or a treatment plan, and not a substitute for professional advice. For questions about diagnosis, development or anything clinical, your GP, paediatrician or your child’s SENCo (Special Educational Needs Coordinator) at school are the right people to speak to.

Start with your child’s sensory world

A great deal of what looks like “difficult behaviour” in autistic children is actually a sensory response. Many autistic people experience sound, light, touch, taste, smell and movement differently from non-autistic people, sometimes more intensely (hypersensitivity), sometimes less intensely in a way that makes them seek out more input (hyposensitivity), and often a mixture of both depending on the sense and the day. None of this is fussiness; it’s how their nervous system is genuinely processing the world.

You don’t need a specialist assessment to start noticing patterns at home, though an occupational therapist can help if things feel stuck. Some starting points that come up repeatedly in guidance from the National Autistic Society and the NHS:

Sound: notice which noises cause distress — the hoover, hand dryers, a sibling’s television — and where you can, reduce them or offer ear defenders or headphones as a genuine tool rather than a last resort.
Light: harsh overhead lighting and flickering bulbs bother some autistic children considerably. Softer, warm-toned lamps and natural light where possible can make a room feel calmer.
Touch: clothing labels, seams, certain fabrics or food textures can be genuinely uncomfortable, not a preference to be argued out of. Letting your child choose fabrics and cutting out labels is a small thing that removes a daily irritant.
Smell: strong-smelling cleaning products, perfumes or cooking smells can be overwhelming. Unscented alternatives and open windows are a simple fix.
Movement and pressure: some children need to rock, spin, jump or seek deep pressure (a tight hug, a weighted blanket, a den to burrow into) to feel regulated. This is self-regulation, not naughtiness, and stopping it usually makes things worse, not better.

Where you can, try to build a low-stimulus space into your home: a corner with cushions, dim lighting and no demands, where your child can retreat when things feel like too much. It doesn’t need to be a dedicated room. A tent in the corner of a bedroom or a defined spot on a sofa works just as well. The point isn’t the furniture; it’s that your child knows there’s somewhere they’re allowed to go when the world gets loud, and that going there isn’t treated as a problem to solve.

Visual supports and predictable routines

Many autistic children find the world easier to manage when they can see what’s coming. Spoken instructions and abstract time concepts (“in a bit,” “later,” “soon”) can be hard to hold onto, especially under stress, whereas something visual stays put and can be checked and rechecked.

A visual timetable — photos, symbols or written words showing the sequence of the day, from breakfast through to bedtime — is one of the most widely recommended tools for exactly this reason. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated. A strip of laminated cards on a Velcro board, a whiteboard list, or even a simple checklist on paper all do the job. What matters is that your child can see what’s happening now, what’s happening next, and roughly what the shape of the day looks like.

The same logic applies to change. Sudden changes of plan are difficult for a lot of autistic children, not because they’re being rigid for its own sake, but because a predictable routine is one of the few things that makes an unpredictable, often overwhelming world feel manageable. Where you can, give advance notice: “we’re going to Grandma’s on Saturday instead of the park,” said a day or two ahead with a visual cue if that helps, rather than sprung on them as you’re putting shoes on. When change is unavoidable and sudden, a short, calm explanation of what’s happening and why can still help, even if it doesn’t remove the difficulty entirely.

It’s worth saying: routines and visual supports aren’t about controlling your child or making them “fit in” to how the household runs. They’re a genuine accessibility tool, in the same way a ramp is for someone who uses a wheelchair. They reduce the cognitive load of figuring out what’s happening next, which frees up energy for everything else.

Meltdowns and shutdowns are overwhelm, not misbehaviour

This is worth being very clear about, because the language around it still gets muddled in a lot of everyday advice: a meltdown is not a tantrum, and it isn’t a bid for attention, a manipulation tactic, or a discipline problem. The National Autistic Society describes a meltdown as an intense response to an overwhelming situation, one where the person becomes completely overwhelmed by their circumstances and temporarily loses control of their behaviour. It might look like shouting, crying, lashing out or being unable to communicate at all. It is not a choice, and in the moment, your child usually has very little control over it.

A shutdown is the quieter counterpart to a meltdown, and it’s easy to miss because it doesn’t look dramatic. Instead of an outward response, your child might go silent, withdraw, freeze, or seem to “switch off” and become unable to respond, move or communicate. It’s the same underlying overwhelm, expressed inward rather than outward, and it deserves the same patience and reduction of demands, even though it’s far less obvious than a meltdown from the outside.

A few things tend to genuinely help, rather than escalate the situation:

Reduce demands, don’t add them. Once a meltdown or shutdown has started, this isn’t the moment for instructions, consequences or reasoning. The nervous system is overloaded; talking things through can wait until afterwards.
Reduce sensory input where you can. Dim the lights, lower your voice, move away from noise and crowds if it’s safe to do so.
Stay calm and nearby, without crowding. Your steadiness matters more than your words. Some children want you close; others need space. You’ll learn which your child needs.
Keep yourself and others safe, without shame. If your child is at risk of hurting themselves or others, focus on safety rather than correction. This isn’t the moment for a lecture about behaviour, and it definitely isn’t the moment for it to happen in front of an audience if you can help it.
Look for patterns afterwards, not during. Once everyone has recovered, it can help to gently think back over what led up to it — tiredness, a change of plan, a noisy environment, a build-up of small stresses across the day. Meltdowns are very often the result of accumulated overwhelm rather than one single trigger, which is why they can seem to “come from nowhere” when actually the pressure has been building for hours.

It’s also worth protecting recovery time. After a meltdown or shutdown, your child may be exhausted, and pushing straight back into normal activities or demands can tip things over again. Some autistic children and adults describe a kind of cumulative exhaustion — sometimes called autistic fatigue or burnout — from the ongoing effort of managing sensory input, social expectations and unpredictability, particularly across a school week. Building in genuine downtime, not just quiet time between activities, is protective rather than indulgent.

Communication that follows your child’s lead

Autistic children communicate in a huge range of ways, and one of the most respectful things you can do as a parent is to work with how your child actually communicates rather than how you’d prefer them to. Some autistic children are highly verbal and articulate, sometimes with a specialist vocabulary in a subject they love, while finding small talk or reading tone of voice much harder. Some communicate through a mixture of speech and other means. Some use very little or no spoken language and communicate through gesture, behaviour, an AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) device, symbols such as PECS, sign systems like Makaton, or written words. All of these are valid, complete forms of communication — none of them is a lesser version of “real” talking that needs to be corrected out of your child.

A few principles tend to hold up well across very different children:

Be direct and specific. Sarcasm, idioms and rhetorical questions (“do you think that’s a good idea?”) can be genuinely confusing rather than obviously meaningful. Saying what you mean clearly isn’t cold; it’s clear.
Give processing time. Some autistic children need longer to process spoken language and formulate a response. Resist the urge to fill the silence or repeat the question in a different way straight away — a longer pause than feels natural is often exactly what’s needed.
Follow their interests into conversation. If your child wants to talk about trains, dinosaurs or a particular video game at length, that’s a genuine connection point, not a distraction from “proper” conversation. Shared enthusiasm builds trust and gives you a route into back-and-forth communication on their terms.
Don’t insist on eye contact. For many autistic people, eye contact is uncomfortable or even distracting from listening, rather than a sign of disrespect or inattention. Your child can be listening carefully while looking at the floor, a toy, or somewhere else entirely.
Respect “no” and non-verbal refusal. A turned back, a pushed-away hand, or a flat “no” deserves the same weight as a longer explanation would. Autistic children are frequently taught, directly or indirectly, that their refusals don’t count unless justified at length — worth being conscious of undoing at home.

If your child uses AAC or another communication aid, the single most useful thing you can do is treat it as their voice, not a toy, a last resort, or something to be phased out. Learn to use it yourself, model it in everyday interactions, and make sure it goes everywhere your child goes.

Working with school: SENCo, one-page profiles and EHCPs

You know your child better than anyone, and that knowledge is genuinely valuable to school staff, even when it doesn’t feel like it in a rushed corridor conversation at pick-up time. Getting the relationship with school right can make an enormous difference to how well your child copes with their day.

A few terms are worth knowing, because they come up constantly once you’re navigating UK school SEN support:

SENCo (Special Educational Needs Coordinator) is the staff member at your child’s school responsible for coordinating support for children with SEN. They’re usually your main point of contact for anything related to your child’s autism-related needs at school, and it’s worth building a working relationship with them early rather than only reaching out in a crisis.
A one-page profile is exactly what it sounds like: a single page summarising who your child is, what’s important to them, what they’re good at, what support helps, and what tends to make things harder. Good ones are written with real input from the child themselves, in their own words wherever possible, not just written about them by adults. It’s a quick, practical reference that a supply teacher, a new TA, or a new class teacher can read in two minutes and immediately understand something real about your child.
An EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan) is a legal document for children and young people whose needs require more support than a school can provide through its ordinary SEN provision. It sets out your child’s needs, the outcomes everyone is working towards, and the specific support that must legally be provided to meet them. Getting one involves a formal assessment request to your Local Authority, and the process can be slow and, honestly, sometimes exhausting. Independent organisations such as IPSEA offer free, legally grounded advice on the EHCP process, and your local SENDIASS (SEND Information, Advice and Support Service) can help you understand your rights and prepare for meetings, entirely free of charge.

In practice, a few habits make ongoing school communication smoother: keep a simple written record of meetings and agreed actions, so nothing important relies on memory months later; ask for things in writing where you can, even if it’s just a follow-up email summarising a phone call; and share what works at home. If a visual timetable format, a way of giving instructions, or a calming strategy genuinely helps your child, school staff generally want to know, since it saves them reinventing something you’ve already worked out through trial and error.

It’s also fine to advocate firmly. You’re not being difficult by asking for reasonable adjustments, requesting a review meeting, or querying whether current support is actually working. That’s the job of a parent navigating a system that, however well-intentioned individual staff are, doesn’t always move quickly or communicate well by default.

Celebrating your child’s real interests and strengths

It’s easy, especially once you’re deep into managing sensory needs, appointments and school meetings, for the conversation about your child to become almost entirely about difficulties. Their genuine interests and strengths deserve just as much attention, not as a consolation prize, but because they are often the clearest window into who your child actually is.

An intense, deeply held interest — sometimes called a special interest — is common among autistic children, and it’s worth resisting any urge to see it as something to be limited or redirected towards “more normal” hobbies. These interests are frequently a genuine source of joy, comfort and expertise, and they can be a real strength: a child who can tell you every fact about the Titanic, sort dinosaurs by geological era, or explain train timetabling in detail is developing focus, memory, research skills and confidence, alongside simple, uncomplicated happiness. Many autistic adults describe their childhood special interests as foundational to their later careers, friendships or sense of identity.

Look, too, for the quieter strengths that don’t always get named: a strong sense of fairness and honesty, attention to detail, loyalty to friends, a good memory for facts and patterns, and often a depth of empathy that can be misread as its opposite simply because it’s expressed differently. None of this cancels out the genuine difficulties your child faces day to day. Both things are true at once, and a child who only ever hears about what’s hard for them misses out on the equally important fact of what they’re good at and what makes them happy.

Looking after yourself too

Supporting an autistic child well, over years, requires you to have something left in the tank. This isn’t a side note; it’s part of the job.

A few practical things genuinely help, even if none of them fix everything:

A carer’s assessment. If you’re a parent carer, you’re entitled to ask your local council for a carer’s assessment, which can identify extra support, respite or financial help you might be entitled to and may not know about.
Parent groups, in person or online. Talking to other parents of autistic children, or autistic adults who are willing to share their own childhood experiences, can be genuinely reassuring in a way that generic advice often isn’t. The National Autistic Society runs local branches and parent-to-parent support across the UK.
Small, protected breaks. A walk on your own, ten minutes with a cup of tea that’s still hot when you finish it, or an evening handed over to a partner or trusted relative — these aren’t luxuries, and taking them isn’t a sign you’re not coping. They’re what makes the rest of it sustainable.
Permission to grieve the gap between expectation and reality, if that’s part of your experience. Some parents feel this and some don’t, and either is normal. If you do, it doesn’t mean you don’t accept your child exactly as they are; it can simply sit alongside that love, and it tends to ease with time and getting to know your particular child rather than an idea of a child.

Your own wellbeing isn’t in competition with your child’s. When you’re running on empty, everything above becomes harder to sustain, and your child, who reads your stress more accurately than most people realise, feels that too. Looking after yourself is part of looking after them.

Where to go for more

Everything here is general, practical guidance drawn from national UK resources, not a clinical assessment of your individual child. If you have concerns about your child’s development, sensory needs or communication, your GP or paediatrician is the right starting point for anything medical, and your child’s school SENCo is the right person for anything related to education. The National Autistic Society’s website (autism.org.uk) and the NHS pages on autism (nhs.uk/conditions/autism) are both good, UK-specific places to read further, at whatever pace feels manageable.

You don’t need to get everything right straight away, and you won’t. What tends to matter most, over time, is what matters in most relationships: paying close attention to who your child actually is, taking their experience of the world seriously even when it differs from your own, and adjusting as you go.

If you’ve got a child in Year 6, you’ve probably already heard the word “SATs” said in at least three different tones this term: brisk and factual from the school newsletter, faintly panicked from other parents in the playground, and increasingly often from your own child, who has picked up on all of it. None of that is your fault, and none of it means you’re behind. Most parents are working out what SATs actually involve at roughly the same pace their child is.

This guide is a plain-English look at what Key Stage 2 SATs really are, what genuine test anxiety can look like in a ten- or eleven-year-old, and how to support your child through the spring term without the whole household organising itself around one week in May. None of it requires turning your kitchen table into a revision bootcamp.

What SATs actually are, and what they’re not

Key Stage 2 SATs are the national curriculum tests taken by children in the final year of primary school, usually in the second week of May. For the current Year 6 cohort, the Department for Education has confirmed the tests will run from Monday 10 to Thursday 13 May 2027. Every state primary school in England sits them in the same week, under the same rules, on papers set centrally by the DfE’s Standards and Testing Agency.

Not every subject works the same way. Reading, maths and English grammar, punctuation and spelling (usually shortened to GPS) are tested with formal written papers: one reading paper, three maths papers (an arithmetic paper and two reasoning papers), and a GPS paper split into a grammar and punctuation test plus a separate spelling test. Writing and science are not sat as timed tests at all. Both are assessed by your child’s own class teacher, using work built up across the year, not a single sitting. Writing assessments are then moderated externally, so it isn’t just one teacher’s opinion.

Results come back as a scaled score, not a mark out of 100 or a grade. The scale runs from 80 to 120, and a score of 100 or more means your child has met the “expected standard” for their age. It isn’t a pass or fail in the way a driving test is — there’s no certificate, and a score in the 90s doesn’t mean your child has failed anything. Writing and science are reported as “working at the expected standard” (there’s no higher category for science) from the teacher assessment. You’ll get the results in July, well after the tests themselves are a distant memory for most children.

What SATs are genuinely for is measuring how a cohort and a school are doing against the national curriculum, and giving secondary schools a starting data point — many use the scores for setting in Year 7, though that’s a school-by-school decision, not a rule. What they are not for is deciding which secondary school your child goes to (that’s down to admissions, not SATs performance), and they don’t appear anywhere on your child as a person once they’ve left primary school. It’s genuinely a snapshot of one week, not a verdict.

If your child has an EHCP or other identified additional needs, it’s worth checking in with the SENCo about access arrangements — things like extra time, rest breaks, a reader, or in some cases modified papers are all things schools can apply for, and most will already have this in hand for children who need it. It’s a reasonable thing to ask about directly if nobody has mentioned it to you.

Realistic signs of test anxiety in a 10- or 11-year-old

Some nerves before SATs are completely normal, and honestly a fairly good sign — it usually means your child understands the tests matter a bit and wants to do reasonably well. That’s different from anxiety that’s actually getting in the way of their day-to-day life, and it’s worth knowing the difference so you’re not either dismissing something real or panicking over something ordinary.

According to NHS guidance for parents, stress around exams commonly shows up physically before it shows up as anything your child can put into words: headaches, stomach aches, and disrupted sleep are all common. You might also notice appetite changes — eating less, or picking at food, particularly around homework time or the school run.

Behaviourally, watch for irritability that’s out of character, a reluctance to go to school that wasn’t there before, or your child pulling back from things they normally enjoy — football, a hobby, seeing friends. Some children go quiet and withdrawn; others get snappy over small things that wouldn’t usually bother them. YoungMinds, the children’s mental health charity, notes that children under exam pressure often start comparing themselves critically to classmates or worrying about expectations they think other people have of them, even when nobody has actually said anything of the sort out loud.

Emotionally, the signs to take seriously are persistent worry that doesn’t ease once your child is away from schoolwork, tearfulness that seems disproportionate to what’s actually happening, or talk that sounds pessimistic or hopeless rather than simply nervous — “I’m going to fail everything” said once in a bad mood is different from a child who seems to genuinely believe it and can’t be talked round.

Place2Be, which runs mental health support directly inside primary schools, points out that this is exactly the age where children start to notice tests are being taken more seriously by the adults around them, which can amplify pressure even when nobody intends it. Ten- and eleven-year-olds also don’t always have the vocabulary to say “I’m anxious” — that’s a fairly sophisticated piece of self-reporting for a child who’s still developing the ability to name and separate their own feelings. Much more often it comes out sideways, as a sore tummy on a Monday morning, sudden reluctance about a subject they used to like, or a meltdown over something that wouldn’t normally register. Reading the behaviour, rather than waiting for your child to announce it in words, is usually more reliable at this age.

If what you’re seeing feels like more than ordinary nerves, or it’s lasting for weeks rather than days, it’s worth a conversation with your child’s teacher — they’ll usually have a good read on how your child is coping in the classroom compared with at home, and the two pictures aren’t always the same. If anxiety is significantly affecting your child’s eating, sleep, or ability to function day to day, that’s worth raising with your GP rather than waiting to see if it passes on its own.

How to talk about SATs at home without turning the volume up

The single most useful thing most parents can do is keep SATs conversation matter-of-fact rather than momentous. Children this age are extremely good at reading how seriously the adults around them are taking something, regardless of what’s actually being said. A calm “you’ve got your grammar test on Tuesday, how are you feeling about it?” lands very differently to a family atmosphere that’s been quietly reorganising itself around May for months.

It helps to name the nerves rather than talk around them. Something like “it’s totally normal to feel a bit wobbly about this, most people do” tends to land better than either ignoring the topic altogether or reassuring too hard, which can accidentally signal to a child that this is a much bigger deal than they’d assumed. YoungMinds’ advice for parents is fairly consistent on this point: acknowledge the feeling as valid, then move on, rather than dwelling.

Try to keep the goals your child’s own, rather than borrowed from you, a sibling, or another family. If your child says they want to “get all the grammar questions right,” that’s a fine, specific, achievable thing to encourage. If the goal in the room is really about you wanting a particular scaled score, children usually sense that too, even if it’s never said directly, and it tends to raise pressure rather than motivation.

It’s worth being deliberate about not comparing your child to siblings, cousins, or classmates, even in passing or as a joke. It’s also worth resisting the urge to let SATs dominate every dinner-table conversation for a whole term — ask about it, then let it go, and talk about other things. Children pick up far more from the general household mood than from any single conversation, so if you’re anxious about the tests yourself, that’s worth managing quietly on your own side rather than in front of your child.

Plenty of children ask some version of “what happens if I fail?” at some point, and it’s worth having an honest, unrushed answer ready rather than brushing past it. The truthful answer is genuinely reassuring: there’s no failing, in the sense your child probably means it. Nobody stays back a year, nobody is sent to a different school, and a lower scaled score simply tells the teacher where to focus a bit more support next year — which is exactly what it’s designed to do. Saying something close to that, in your own words, tends to land better than a vague “don’t worry about it,” because it actually answers the question your child is asking.

Revision habits that work, without turning the spring term into exam camp

Short, regular, low-key practice beats long weekend cramming sessions almost every time, and this isn’t just intuition — it’s the same principle behind most evidence-based study advice for any age. Fifteen to twenty minutes of focused practice most days is genuinely more effective, and far more sustainable for everyone’s mood, than a two-hour Sunday session that ends in tears on both sides.

Your child’s teacher already has a plan. Schools build SATs preparation into normal lessons well before May, so your job at home isn’t to run a parallel curriculum — it’s to top up, not duplicate. A few short, well-chosen sessions on things your child finds genuinely tricky will do more good than trying to cover everything from scratch. If you’re not sure what to focus on, ask the teacher directly; they’ll usually be able to point to specific gaps rather than leaving you guessing.

Past papers and practice questions are useful in small doses, mainly because they get your child used to the format and timing rather than because cramming content at this stage makes much difference — most of what’s being tested was taught over the previous two years, not crammed in the final term. If your child enjoys short, structured practice, Learnaroo Hub has SATs-prep resources built around exactly this kind of low-pressure, bite-sized practice rather than long sittings, which some families find easier to fit around normal life.

Sleep, food, exercise and friends aren’t extras to squeeze in around revision — they’re what actually protects a child’s ability to concentrate and retain anything at all. NHS guidance is direct about this: prioritise sleep over last-minute cramming, keep meals balanced rather than leaning on sugar and caffeine, and don’t cancel the things your child looks forward to, whether that’s football training, a sleepover, or just unstructured time doing nothing in particular. A tired, wound-up ten-year-old who’s revised for three hours generally does worse than a rested one who’s revised for twenty minutes, because concentration and working memory both suffer under fatigue and stress.

It’s also fine — good, even — to keep half-term and weekends mostly normal. A whole spring term that revolves entirely around SATs tends to raise a child’s sense that this is a huge, looming event, which is precisely the effect most parents are trying to avoid. Little and often, folded into an otherwise ordinary week, tends to keep both the revision and the anxiety at a manageable size.

What genuinely helps on the day, versus what doesn’t

The night before a SATs paper, the single highest-value thing you can do is protect your child’s sleep rather than their revision. A full night’s rest does more for concentration, memory recall and mood the next morning than an extra hour of last-minute practice, and cramming the evening before a test tends to spike anxiety right before bed, which is the opposite of helpful. If your child wants to glance over a couple of spellings or times tables for reassurance, that’s fine — but keep it brief and let it end well before bedtime.

On the morning itself, a proper breakfast and a normal routine matter more than anything academic. Chaotic, rushed mornings raise stress hormones before a child has even sat down; calm, familiar ones don’t. Keep the send-off low-key — “have a good morning, I’ll see you later” does more good than a big speech about how important the test is, however well-intentioned.

If your child has a coping technique that works for them — slow breathing, rolling their shoulders, a particular phrase they say to themselves — a quick reminder of it on the way out the door can help more than any content revision at that point. These are the kinds of practical, in-the-moment techniques both the NHS and YoungMinds highlight for exam mornings generally, and they translate well to an eleven-year-old walking into a school hall.

Afterwards, resist asking a detailed post-mortem of every question the moment your child gets in the car. “How did it go?” is enough; if they want to talk about specifics, they will. If they don’t, that’s fine too — dwelling on a paper that’s already finished rarely helps and can make the next one feel heavier than it needs to.

Perhaps the most useful thing to hold onto through the whole week is that SATs measure one snapshot of one week in a ten- or eleven-year-old’s life, not their worth, their intelligence, or their future. Plenty of children who found SATs stressful go on to thrive at secondary school and beyond, and plenty who breezed through barely remember them by September. Your calm is doing more work than you probably realise — not because it changes the test, but because it changes how your child experiences it.

If you’ve ever sent a child upstairs for their PE kit, a jumper and a water bottle, and watched them come back down ten minutes later holding a single sock and no memory of why they went up there, you’ve already met executive function in action. Or rather, you’ve met it not quite working yet, which is completely normal, and which is exactly what this article is about.

“Executive function” sounds like something from a management textbook, but it’s actually one of the most useful things you can understand about how children think, learn and cope. It’s not about how clever a child is. It’s about how well their brain can hold onto information, resist an impulse, and switch between one thing and another. Researchers increasingly think these skills matter as much as, and sometimes more than, raw intelligence when it comes to how children do at school and in life. The clearest, most widely used framework for understanding it comes from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, and it’s worth getting familiar with, because it changes how a lot of everyday behaviour looks.

What executive function actually is

Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child describes executive function using the image of an air traffic control system. A busy airport has to track multiple planes at once, hold information about each one, filter out what doesn’t matter right now, and change plans quickly when something unexpected happens — a delay, a weather change, a runway closure. The brain does something similar every time a child has to concentrate on schoolwork with noise around them, remember an instruction long enough to act on it, or cope when something doesn’t go the way they expected.

In plain terms, executive function is the set of mental skills that let a person hold information in mind, filter out distractions, control impulses, and adjust when circumstances change. It isn’t one single skill. It’s closer to a management system that coordinates lots of other skills, sitting mostly in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain just behind the forehead. That part of the brain happens to be the slowest to mature of all, which is a large part of why these skills take so long to develop and why children (and let’s be honest, plenty of adults) are so inconsistent at using them.

The three skills that make up executive function

Harvard’s framework, echoed across the research literature, breaks executive function down into three core skills. They work together constantly, so in real life they’re hard to fully separate, but understanding each one on its own makes it much easier to spot what’s actually going on when a child is struggling.

Working memory

Working memory is the ability to hold information in mind and use it, rather than just storing it. It’s the mental whiteboard a child needs when you say, “Go upstairs, get your shoes, and bring down your book bag.” It’s also what they’re using when they’re halfway through a maths problem and need to remember the number they were carrying, or when they’re trying to follow the plot of a story while also thinking about what happens next.

A child with weaker working memory isn’t being lazy or not listening. They may genuinely have lost the first half of the instruction by the time you finished the second half. This is why a lot of good primary-school practice, like breaking instructions into single steps, or using a visual checklist by the door, isn’t “dumbing things down.” It’s just working with how memory actually functions at that age.

Inhibitory control (self-control)

Inhibitory control is the ability to master an impulse or a habit long enough to think before acting. It’s what lets a child wait for their turn in conversation instead of blurting out an answer, resist grabbing a biscuit before dinner even though it’s sitting right there, or stop themselves mid-run when a ball bounces towards a road.

This is the skill most often mistaken for “good behaviour” or “naughtiness,” when really it’s a cognitive skill like any other, one that’s still being built. A four-year-old shouting out the answer in a group activity isn’t being rude. Their inhibitory control simply hasn’t caught up with their enthusiasm yet, and for most children, it won’t fully catch up for years.

Cognitive flexibility

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to shift perspective, adjust to a change in rules, or switch from one way of thinking to another. It’s what a child needs to stop silent reading and move into PE without a meltdown, to accept that their favourite friend can’t come round and think up a plan B, or to change tactics in a game when their first approach clearly isn’t working.

Children who find this harder often aren’t being stubborn. Shifting gear costs real mental effort for them, in a way it might not for a sibling or classmate. That’s why sudden changes of plan, even small ones, can trigger a reaction that looks completely out of proportion to the change itself.

Why it might matter more than IQ

This is where the research gets genuinely striking. The developmental psychologist Adele Diamond, whose work underpins much of the current understanding of executive function, has found that these skills predict children’s success in school and beyond as well as, and in some studies better than, IQ. Working memory and self-control in particular have been shown to predict later achievement, health and quality of life, often more strongly than a child’s IQ score or their family’s income.

That doesn’t mean intelligence doesn’t matter. It means that a child can be extremely bright and still struggle badly at school if they can’t hold instructions in mind, resist distraction, or adapt when a lesson plan changes. And it means a child who isn’t top of the class academically can still go on to thrive, because they’ve got a strong, well-practised set of tools for managing themselves, their attention and their plans. Executive function is arguably more coachable than IQ too, which is genuinely good news, because it means there’s a lot parents can do.

Why this takes so long to build

Executive function isn’t something children are born with. Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child is clear that children are born with the potential to develop these skills, and that potential is shaped, strengthened or held back by the quality of the relationships and experiences around them, starting from infancy. Development doesn’t happen in one smooth line either. It comes in bursts, tied closely to how the prefrontal cortex matures, and that part of the brain isn’t considered fully developed until a person’s early twenties.

The early years, roughly ages three to five, are one of the biggest growth spurts, which is why this stage of parenting can feel like such a rollercoaster of huge steps forward followed by sudden regressions. The primary years bring steadier, more gradual refinement. Then adolescence brings another real surge of development, alongside a wave of hormonal, social and neurological change, which is part of why a fifteen-year-old can plan an entire group project with three friends over group chat and still somehow leave their coat on a bus. The system genuinely is still under construction. Inconsistency at every age is normal, not a sign that something has gone wrong.

Stress matters here too. Harvard’s research is explicit that ongoing, unbuffered stress can undermine the development of these circuits, while stable, responsive relationships help build them. That’s not a reason for parents to feel they need to engineer a perfectly calm household. It’s more a reminder that connection and predictability do quiet, useful work in the background, even when nothing that looks like “brain training” is happening at all.

Everyday things that build these skills (not flashcards)

None of this needs a workbook. Some of the most effective ways to build executive function are ordinary bits of family life, done often rather than perfectly.

Cooking or baking together. Following a recipe uses working memory, waiting for something to bake or boil practises inhibitory control, and adapting when you’re out of an ingredient practises flexibility, all in one go.
Games with rules, especially ones where the rules change. Card games like Uno, or games like Dobble where the winning match keeps changing, ask a child to hold a rule in mind and switch quickly. Board games more generally build turn-taking and patience.
Pretend play and role play. When children invent their own rules for a game (“you have to knock three times before you can come into the den”), they’re holding those rules in mind and adjusting them as play develops. This is why child-led imaginative play is doing more heavy lifting than it looks like from the sofa.
Multi-step chores. Asking a child to lay the table, in order (plates, then cutlery, then glasses), or to get themselves ready for school following a simple checklist, is genuine working-memory practice dressed up as a normal Tuesday.
Active games with rules, like Simon Says, musical statues, or “the floor is lava.” These combine physical impulse control with listening and quick switching, and they’re usually more fun than anything with a worksheet attached.
Music and sport. Learning an instrument or playing a team sport both involve holding a sequence in mind, controlling an impulse (not swinging too early, not playing the wrong note), and adjusting to what’s happening around you in real time.
Plain, unsupervised, unstructured play. Play that isn’t run by an adult, where the child has to work out the plan, referee their own disagreements and adjust the game as it goes, seems to be particularly good for building the kind of self-directed executive function children need when nobody’s there to organise things for them.

The common thread isn’t difficulty, it’s practice. A child gets better at holding information, waiting, and switching gear the same way they get better at anything else: by doing it, a lot, in low-stakes situations, ideally while having a good time.

What weaker executive function can look like day to day

It’s worth saying clearly: nearly every child shows some of these signs, some of the time, at every age. This is a wide, completely normal spectrum, not a checklist for concern. Day to day, weaker executive function might look like:

Needing an instruction repeated, or only managing the first step of three
Starting homework with good intentions and drifting off within a couple of minutes
Big, out-of-proportion reactions to small changes of plan
Interrupting, blurting out answers, or struggling to wait their turn
A permanently chaotic bag, desk or bedroom, or regularly losing kit
Meltdowns when a game doesn’t go the way they wanted
Needing a lot of warning and support to move from one activity to another

Tiredness, hunger, a change in routine, or a stressful week will make every single one of these more likely in any child, on any given day. That’s the system working exactly as expected under load, not evidence of a problem. The useful question isn’t “does my child ever do this,” because they will. It’s whether these patterns are noticeably more frequent, more intense, or more persistent than you’d expect for their age, across more than one setting.

When it’s worth mentioning to school or your GP

Most of the time, the answer is simply time, patience, and the kind of everyday practice described above. But it’s worth raising with your child’s teacher or your GP if executive function difficulties are consistently and significantly out of step with what you’d expect for their age, and if that’s true both at home and at school or nursery, not just in one setting on one bad day.

A few signals worth paying attention to:

Your child’s teacher has independently raised similar concerns, without prompting from you
The difficulties are clearly getting in the way of learning, friendships or family life on a regular basis, not just occasionally
There’s been little improvement over a reasonable stretch of time, rather than the gradual progress you’d expect as they grow
These difficulties are showing up alongside other things, like speech and language delay, or persistent difficulty with attention

Raising it doesn’t commit you to anything, and it doesn’t mean a diagnosis is coming. It simply starts a conversation. A school’s SENCO or your GP can help you work out whether what you’re seeing is within the wide range of normal development, or whether it’s worth a closer look, and either answer is a genuinely useful one to have. Executive function difficulties turn up across a huge range of profiles, including some children with ADHD, developmental language disorder or autism, but plenty of children with real, persistent executive function struggles don’t fit neatly into any of those categories at all. That’s fine. The support that helps, patience, structure, predictable routines, and plenty of low-pressure practice, tends to help regardless of whether a label is ever attached.

If you want a few more low-pressure, everyday ideas to weave into a normal week without adding another thing to your to-do list, Learnaroo Hub’s resource library has some simple activities worth dipping into. But honestly, the version of this you’re probably already doing, cooking together, playing a board game on a Sunday, letting them get properly bored and invent their own game, is exactly the kind of thing that builds this system. Executive function doesn’t grow because a child is exceptionally clever. It grows because someone gave them enough ordinary chances to practise, and enough patience while they got it wrong on the way to getting it right.

Every school has a version of the same scene. A TA sits beside the same child, in the same seat, for every lesson, every day, term after term. It looks like support. Ofsted inspectors used to nod approvingly at it. Parents often ask for it by name. And for years, most of us assumed it was simply good practice – more adult attention for the pupil who needs it most has to be a good thing.

The evidence says otherwise, and it’s worth taking seriously because it comes from an unusually solid place. The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants is built on a systematic review of the research base on TA deployment – not opinion, not a training company’s sales pitch, but a synthesis of what actually happens to pupils’ outcomes under different models of support. Its conclusion is blunt: the way most schools have drifted into deploying TAs is quietly working against the pupils it’s meant to help. The fix isn’t more training days on “TA skills” in the abstract. It’s a handful of specific, practical changes to how you brief, position and work alongside the TA in your room. This is what those changes look like.

What the evidence actually found

The EEF’s language for the default pattern is the “Velcro” model – a TA effectively stuck to one pupil or one small group, for extended periods, lesson after lesson. It happens for good reasons. A child is struggling, an adult is available, and putting the two together feels like the responsible thing to do. But the report traces what that pattern does over time: it quietly separates the pupil from the classroom teacher, from the pace and content of whole-class teaching, and often from their peer group as well. The pupils who most need expert teaching end up getting the least of it, mediated instead through an adult who is warm and well-intentioned but, in most cases, not trained as a teacher.

The report’s first recommendation states this as plainly as guidance reports ever do: TAs should not be used as an informal teaching resource for low-attaining pupils. The principle underneath it is one worth pinning above your desk – pupils who struggle most should get at least as much time with the teacher as everyone else in the room, not less. If a TA has a direct instructional role, the expectation is that they add value to what the teacher is doing, not quietly substitute for it.

None of this is an argument against TAs. The same evidence base is just as clear that well-deployed TAs move the needle. Structured, short, well-resourced interventions delivered by trained TAs are associated with roughly three to four additional months of progress on average – five months in primary, slightly less in secondary, and a little lower for primary maths specifically. But that figure comes with a condition attached, and it’s the condition most schools skip: those gains only show up when TAs work in structured settings with proper training and support. Put a TA into an informal, unsupported instructional role and the same evidence shows the effect can turn negative. The tool isn’t the problem. How you deploy it is.

Briefing that takes five minutes, not fifty

Ask most TAs what they find most frustrating and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: they walk into lessons not knowing what’s actually being taught, what the class already covered last week, or what “success” looks like for the pupils they’re about to support. They improvise. Sometimes the improvising is excellent. Often it means a TA quietly reteaching a method the class moved on from, or giving help that undercuts what you’re trying to achieve.

The EEF guidance is specific about what a TA needs to know before a lesson starts, and it’s a shorter list than you’d think:

the concepts, facts or information being taught
the skills pupils are meant to learn, apply, practise or extend
the intended learning outcomes – what “getting it” looks like
what feedback you want them to give, and in what form

None of that needs a formal meeting. Most schools that do this well have simply found small, protected pockets of time rather than waiting for one that never appears: a TA arriving fifteen minutes before the bell, a slice of PPA time spent together rather than apart, five minutes at the end of assembly, or a plan left on the TA’s desk the day before with the outcomes and the “watch out for” pupils flagged. What matters is that it happens consistently, not that it’s elaborate. A TA who knows the intended outcome for a lesson can adapt on the fly when a pupil goes off-script. A TA who’s guessing can only ever follow, and following usually means doing the task for the child rather than teaching them to do it themselves.

Building independence, not dependency

This is the part of the guidance that changes classroom practice the most once teachers actually see it in action, because it runs against instinct. The instinct, when a child is stuck, is to help. The evidence says the specific shape of that help is what determines whether it works.

TAs who get the best outcomes are trained to give the least amount of help first, not the most. That means waiting – genuinely waiting, past the point that feels comfortable – before stepping in, so the pupil has a real chance to attempt the next step alone. It means prompting rather than telling: “what do you notice about the first sentence?” rather than reading it for them, “what’s the first thing you need to work out?” rather than working it out and reporting the answer. It means resisting the pull toward task completion. A page of finished, correct work that the pupil didn’t really do themselves feels productive in the moment and is close to worthless six weeks later, because the pupil hasn’t built the skill of doing it unsupported.

Talk quality is the mechanism the research keeps coming back to. A TA who narrates, corrects and fills silences is, without meaning to, training a pupil to wait for the adult rather than think for themselves. A TA who asks a genuine question and then holds the silence is teaching the opposite lesson. It’s a harder skill than it sounds, and it’s one worth explicitly naming and practising with your TA rather than assuming it’ll happen on its own. “Give them the least help that gets them moving” is a good one-line brief to leave on a desk.

Why permanently parking a TA with the same pupils stops working

The Velcro pattern doesn’t just weaken teaching contact. It has quieter costs that build up over a term. Pupils who always have an adult beside them stop being expected to raise a hand, ask a peer, or try before asking – because they’ve learned, correctly, that help is always one seat away. Other pupils notice which children get the permanent adult, and that visibility can do real damage to how a child sees themselves in the room, particularly by Year 5 or 6 and well into secondary. And practically, a TA fixed to one pair of pupils for the whole day has no capacity to respond to whoever actually needs support in a given lesson, which is rarely the same two children every time.

Rotating support instead doesn’t mean abandoning pupils with the greatest need. It means designing deployment around the lesson rather than around a name on a list. In practice that looks like a TA circulating the room rather than parked at one table, dipping in for focused two-minute check-ins with different pupils across a session, taking a different small group for the guided part of each lesson depending on that week’s assessment, or team-teaching a starter so that support isn’t visibly tied to one child at all. Some schools rotate which pupils get TA-led small-group input across the week on a simple timetable, so the same two or three children aren’t always the ones being pulled aside. It takes more planning up front than leaving the arrangement on autopilot. It also means a pupil who’s had a good run of independent work for a fortnight can be given room to keep going, instead of an adult continuing to sit with them out of habit.

What a TA should – and shouldn’t – be doing while you teach the whole class

Whole-class input is where the Velcro habit is most visible and most easily fixed, because it’s largely about positioning and role clarity rather than anything requiring extra training.

What tends not to work: a TA sitting beside one pupil for the entire input, quietly repeating or translating every sentence you say in real time, which trains that pupil to tune out the teacher and tune into the TA instead. Equally unhelpful is a TA who becomes the de facto behaviour manager for a single child, stepping in at the first fidget, because it removes your ability to address behaviour as part of normal classroom routine and singles the pupil out to the rest of the room. And a TA who spends whole-class time doing paperwork, photocopying, or prepping the next activity because “the input doesn’t need me” is a wasted resource – there’s almost always a more useful five minutes available.

What works better: a TA who scans the room during input, picking up the two or three pupils anywhere who look lost rather than fixing on one seat. A TA using a whiteboard or visualiser to model note-taking or key vocabulary alongside you, so support is built into the lesson rather than bolted onto one child. A TA who notes misconceptions during independent work and feeds them back to you at the end, rather than fixing them silently one pupil at a time, so the pattern actually reaches your planning. A TA who moves physically – near the back for input, near pupils who need proximity during independent work, out of the way when a pupil clearly doesn’t need anyone hovering. None of this requires the TA to know less about the lesson. It requires the opposite: the briefing described above is what makes this kind of flexible, room-wide support possible in the first place.

Structured interventions: the other half of the job

Everyday classroom support is one half of what the evidence covers. The other is what happens when a TA takes a pupil or small group out for a dedicated intervention, and here the guidance is unusually precise about what separates an intervention that works from one that doesn’t.

Effective interventions share a shape: sessions are short (often 20–50 minutes), delivered frequently (three to five times a week), and sustained over a defined block (eight to twenty weeks) rather than run indefinitely. TAs delivering them have had real training in that specific programme, not a general TA induction. The intervention has structured materials and a clear plan that the TA follows closely rather than adapting on instinct, and it’s targeted using assessment data so the right pupils are getting it, not just the pupils who happen to be free at that time. Crucially, the report is explicit that interventions are too often run in isolation from classroom teaching, with pupils left to work out the connection themselves. They usually can’t. Someone – teacher or TA – has to make the link between what happened in the intervention room and what’s happening back in class, or the extra time is largely wasted.

If you’re running or overseeing interventions, that’s a reasonable checklist to hold any programme against, whether it’s a scripted commercial scheme or something built in-house. And if a pupil is picking up support from more than one adult across the week – a TA-led intervention, in-class support, maybe a homework club – it helps enormously if everyone involved can see the same plan for what that pupil is working on, rather than each adult reconstructing it from memory. Tools like Learnaroo Hub’s resource-assignment features exist for exactly that kind of coordination, so a teacher and TA are working from the same page for a pupil rather than two different ones.

The working relationship underneath all of it

None of the above holds up without a decent working relationship, and it’s worth being honest that this is often the part schools invest in least. A TA who is treated purely as an extra pair of hands – told what to do at the classroom door with no context and no chance to feed anything back – will, quite reasonably, default to the safest possible interpretation of their role: sit with the child, keep them quiet, keep them working. That’s not a TA problem. It’s what happens when someone is given responsibility without information or voice.

TAs typically spend more one-to-one time with individual pupils than the class teacher does, and that means they often notice things first: a pupil who’s started struggling with reading fluency, a friendship breaking down, a home situation showing up in behaviour. A working relationship built on genuine two-way communication treats that as useful information, not as the TA overstepping. In practice that means asking rather than only telling, taking two minutes at the end of a session to hear what the TA noticed, and being willing to adjust a plan because a TA flagged something that wasn’t obvious from the front of the room. It also means being upfront when something a TA is doing isn’t working, in the same collegial way you’d want feedback yourself – specific and kind, not left to fester.

Mutual respect here isn’t a soft add-on to the evidence above. It’s the condition that makes the evidence usable. A brief only works if the TA trusts it’s worth following. Independence-building only works if the TA believes you’ll back them when a parent asks why their child isn’t getting one-to-one help every lesson. Rotation only works if the TA isn’t quietly worried that spreading their attention looks like they’re doing less. All of that comes from being treated as a professional partner in the classroom, not a supervised extra.

Where to start on Monday

You don’t need a whole-school policy rewrite to change how this works in your own room. Pick one thing. Start briefing your TA on the four “need to knows” before Monday’s lessons, even if it’s a scribbled note rather than a meeting. Watch where your TA sits during your next whole-class input, and move them if they’re parked beside the same pupil out of habit rather than need. Ask your TA, this week, what they’ve noticed about a pupil that you haven’t – and actually use the answer. The EEF’s evidence is consistent on one point above all the others: TAs make a real difference to outcomes when they’re deployed with the same intentionality as any other teaching decision, and very little difference, or a negative one, when they’re not. That’s a decision teachers get to make every single lesson, not once a year in a staff meeting.

Signing the DfE’s Education Staff Wellbeing Charter takes about ten minutes online. Fixing the thing that’s actually breaking your staff room takes rather longer, and it isn’t the thing most wellbeing initiatives target. Every head who has ordered pizza for an INSET afternoon or handed out a “wellbeing day” knows the uncomfortable truth by the following Monday: the goodwill lasts about as long as the leftovers. The workload that caused the exhaustion in the first place hasn’t moved an inch.

That isn’t a reason to give up on staff wellbeing as a leadership priority. It’s a reason to be honest about what actually shifts it. The evidence base on this is now large enough, and specific enough, that no head needs to guess. The Charter tells you what the sector has formally agreed to aim for. Education Support’s Teacher Wellbeing Index tells you, in uncomfortable detail, how far short current practice falls. And the gap between the two points fairly directly at what’s worth doing with a limited budget and a full timetable of your own.

What the Charter actually commits you to

The Education Staff Wellbeing Charter has been open for schools and colleges to sign since November 2021. It’s voluntary, there’s no deadline, and it costs nothing to join beyond the commitment itself. Signing places your school inside a shared framework of five principles and eleven commitments split between the DfE, Ofsted and the institutions that sign up.

The organisational commitments a school takes on when it signs are more concrete than most heads expect. You are agreeing to:

Prioritise staff mental health and embed it into everyday working life, not treat it as a separate initiative
Give staff a genuine voice in decision-making, through structures such as committees or working groups rather than one-off surveys
Drive down unnecessary workload, with the DfE pointing schools toward its workload reduction toolkit as one resource
Champion and enable flexible working, with appraisal and workload reviews tailored to individual roles and circumstances
Build a positive behaviour culture, including recognising good practice among staff
Equip line managers with the tools and training to support their teams’ wellbeing, not just their performance
Set out a clear communications policy so expectations around contact hours and response times are explicit
Support staff career development and progression
Write a specific sub-strategy for protecting the wellbeing of senior leaders, not only classroom staff
Measure staff wellbeing and hold the school accountable for what that measurement shows

That last commitment matters more than it might look. A school that signs the Charter is agreeing, on paper, to actually check whether any of this is working and report on it. Ofsted has also said staff wellbeing is taken into account as part of inspection, which gives the Charter more institutional weight than a typical voluntary pledge.

Where the Charter is more honestly assessed is in its uptake and its teeth. Parliamentary data from January 2023 put the number of schools signed up at roughly 2,350, close to one in ten eligible state schools. By 2025 the DfE was citing more than 4,100 signatories, so the trajectory is upward, but a majority of schools still haven’t joined more than three years after launch. Sarah Hannafin of school leaders’ union NAHT put the underlying issue plainly when the low take-up figures came out: signing “did not bring any extra resources,” and the sector needed something that went “way beyond a simple charter” toward “long-term culture change.” Wellbeing coach Patrick Ottley-O’Connor was blunter still, describing it as a “tick-box exercise” and arguing the DfE “could have provided something more tangible and with accountability.”

None of that is an argument against signing. It’s a reason not to mistake signing for finishing. The Charter is a statement of direction and a checklist of commitments a governing body can hold you to. It is not, on its own, a workload reduction plan, a staffing model, or a budget. Those still have to come from you.

What the Wellbeing Index is actually telling us

Education Support has run the Teacher Wellbeing Index since 2019, and the 2025 edition, published in November, records the lowest overall wellbeing score since the survey began. The headline numbers are stark enough to need no dramatising:

78% of education staff report feeling stressed because of their work
84% of senior leaders specifically report high stress levels — leadership is not a wellbeing-neutral escape from the classroom
71% describe their workload as unmanageable
45% regularly work at least nine additional hours a week beyond their contract
Just 3% of staff manage to keep their work within contracted hours
More than a third have experienced a mental health issue in the past academic year

Teachers now score noticeably below the general UK adult population on wellbeing, life satisfaction and a sense their work is worthwhile, and higher on anxiety. That gap has widened, not narrowed, since the pandemic years when wellbeing was a constant talking point in every staffroom and every trust newsletter.

The Index also captures something school leaders will recognise but rarely see quantified: staff are absorbing responsibilities well outside their job description, and it’s affecting them measurably. 70% of staff are providing some form of emotional regulation support to pupils on a weekly basis, a 31% increase on pre-pandemic levels. 30% are providing food to pupils out of their own resources, and 24% are buying school supplies. Nearly half, 49%, say these additional, unfunded responsibilities are having a negative effect on their own mental health.

Put those two sets of findings together and the picture is unambiguous. Workload is consistently the dominant driver of poor wellbeing across the sector, year on year, and it is compounded rather than caused by the pastoral and welfare gaps schools are quietly filling because no one else will. A single wellbeing day addresses neither.

Why the gesture doesn’t reach the cause

This is the part of the conversation school leaders sometimes find uncomfortable, because a wellbeing day, a hamper, or a mental health first aider are all genuinely well-intentioned, and none of them are wrong to have. The problem is what they’re being asked to substitute for. An employee assistance programme can point a struggling member of staff toward support. It cannot reduce the number of hours that member of staff spends marking, planning or filling in data returns. A mental health first aider can have a good conversation at 4pm. They cannot make the 6pm marking pile smaller.

The clearest evidence for where the real pressure sits goes back further than this year’s Index. A DfE-commissioned workload review group looked specifically at marking practice in 2016 and found that the sheer depth, frequency and “obsessive” nature of marking expected in many schools was actively damaging teachers’ wellbeing and, ironically, their capacity to plan and deliver good lessons in the first place. Marking has stayed one of the most consistently cited workload drivers in every subsequent piece of research, including this year’s Index findings on hours worked beyond contract. A policy that asks for triple-marked books with a written dialogue in three colours is not offset by a biscuit tin in the staffroom.

The same logic applies to flexible working. The DfE published a flexible working toolkit for schools as part of its workload reduction push, and by school leaders’ own reporting, take-up has been thin: coverage of the DfE’s Workload Reduction Taskforce found only a small minority of senior leaders who’d looked at the toolkit rated it genuinely useful in practice. A document sitting on a shared drive is not the same as a school that actually says yes to a compressed-hours or part-time request and rearranges the timetable to make it work.

To be fair to the DfE, some genuinely structural moves have landed alongside the softer initiatives. Performance-related pay was removed from the standard teacher pay framework for the 2024-25 academic year and replaced with a less bureaucratic approach to managing performance, which is exactly the kind of change that reduces paperwork rather than just acknowledging that paperwork is a problem. That’s a useful marker of the distinction this article is drawing: gestures make people feel noticed for an afternoon; structural changes remove hours from someone’s week, permanently, every week.

The levers that actually move the needle

None of what follows is expensive. Most of it is a governance and scheduling decision rather than a budget line, which is precisely why it’s more defensible to a finance committee than a wellbeing away-day would be.

Protect PPA in practice, not just on paper

Every teacher is entitled to at least 10% protected planning, preparation and assessment time by statute. The question worth auditing in your school isn’t whether PPA appears on the timetable, it’s whether it survives contact with cover shortages, last-minute meetings and “just this once” requests. If PPA is the first thing that gets cancelled when a supply teacher doesn’t show, it isn’t protected, it’s provisional. Track how often it’s actually taken over a half-term and you’ll usually find your answer.

Write a marking policy staff believe, then enforce the ceiling not just the floor

Following the 2016 workload review’s findings, a defensible marking policy sets out the minimum useful feedback, not the maximum performable one. Whole-class feedback, live marking during lessons, and verbal feedback logged briefly rather than written out in full are all recognised, evidence-backed ways to give pupils what they need without the multi-hour books-in-a-bag ritual every evening. The test isn’t whether the policy sounds rigorous in an Ofsted-facing document. It’s whether a Year 9 teacher with 180 exercise books can actually comply with it and leave school by 6pm.

Run meeting-light weeks deliberately, not accidentally

A fixed cap, one full staff meeting a fortnight rather than one a week, with everything else pushed to email or a shared document, gives staff back real evening hours without costing the school anything. The Charter’s commitment to “drive down unnecessary workload” is meant to be interpreted this broadly. Audit what every recurring meeting on your calendar is actually for, and be willing to cancel the ones that exist because they always have, not because they change anything.

Do a genuine workload audit, and publish what you found

Not an anonymous survey that vanishes into an SLT inbox. Ask staff, specifically, what task ate the most unpaid time this half-term, and change the top three answers before you ask the question again. The Charter’s accountability commitment, to measure wellbeing and act on it, only means something if staff can see the loop close.

Make flexible working a real conversation, not a policy document

A part-time timetable that genuinely reduces someone’s load, rather than compressing the same workload into fewer days, is one of the few interventions with a direct line to retention. If a request comes in, the test of whether your school takes flexible working seriously is whether the answer involves rearranging the timetable, not just approving the principle.

Write the leadership sub-strategy the Charter actually asks for

84% of senior leaders reporting high stress is not a footnote. Most wellbeing policies are written for classroom staff and assume the head, deputies and heads of department will absorb whatever’s left over. The Charter specifically commits signatory schools to a sub-strategy protecting leaders’ own wellbeing. Very few schools have one in writing. Yours can.

Where a resource bank fits, honestly

Planning and resource creation from scratch is one of the quieter workload drains that rarely makes it onto a wellbeing action plan, because it doesn’t look like overwork the way a stack of exercise books does. It’s evenings and weekends spent building slides, worksheets and schemes of work that a colleague two schools away built last term and would happily never have to build again. A ready-made, curriculum-aligned resource bank, Learnaroo Hub’s library is one example, won’t fix an unmanageable marking policy or a meeting-heavy calendar on its own. But cutting the hours staff spend rebuilding resources that already exist is a genuine structural saving, not a gesture, and it sits alongside protected PPA and a sane marking policy as one lever among several rather than a substitute for any of them.

What to actually do this term

If budget and time are both tight, and they always are, this is a realistic starting order rather than a wish list:

Sign the Charter if you haven’t, but treat it as a checklist to be audited against, not a plan you’ve now completed
Audit PPA take-up over the last half-term against what’s timetabled, and fix the gap before adding anything new
Ask every department to name the single task eating the most unpaid time, and act on the honest answer
Set a hard cap on staff meetings and cancel the recurring ones that exist out of habit
Write down, formally, how your school protects leadership wellbeing specifically, not just staff wellbeing in general
Check your marking policy against what a teacher with a full timetable can actually deliver by 6pm, not what reads well in a self-evaluation document

Staff wellbeing in schools has been measured and talked about for years now without the underlying numbers moving in the right direction, and the 2025 Index is the clearest evidence yet that gestures alone have plateaued. The Charter gives you the shared language and the accountability commitment. The structural changes, protected time, a workable marking policy, a lighter meeting load, and flexible working that’s actually flexible, are what convert that language into fewer nine-hour weeks. Both matter. Only one of them is free to sign and hard to deliver.

It’s 5.40pm, the reading record is still blank, and someone at the table is crying (it may not be the child). If this scene is familiar, you are not doing anything wrong, and you are not alone — homework is one of the most reliably contentious parts of family life with school-age children, in every kind of household, at every level of academic confidence. The good news is that the research on homework is more useful, and more forgiving, than either “homework is essential” or “homework is pointless” camps tend to admit. Understanding what the evidence actually shows — and where it doesn’t show much at all — makes it easier to stop treating every difficult evening as a verdict on your parenting.

What the evidence actually says about homework

The most-cited UK evidence on homework comes from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a charity that reviews education research and summarises it as “months of additional progress” compared with pupils who didn’t get the intervention. Homework, overall, comes out as a positive but genuinely mixed picture — and the average hides an important age split that a lot of homework arguments (both the family kind and the online kind) skip over.

According to the EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit, homework at secondary level is associated with a meaningfully larger effect — in the region of five months’ additional progress — while homework set in primary school shows a much smaller effect, closer to two months. The EEF rates the underlying evidence as moderate: reasonably substantial, but not the strongest tier of evidence it reviews, and full of caveats about how homework is designed rather than simply whether it exists.

That caveat matters more than the headline number. The EEF is explicit that the quality of the task — how cognitively demanding it is, whether it involves genuine retrieval practice, and how directly it connects to what was just taught in class — appears to matter far more than the quantity of homework set. Some of the studies with the strongest results involved short, focused tasks set only a couple of times a week in a given subject, not nightly worksheets. There’s also evidence that impact can plateau or even worsen as the time spent on homework increases past a sensible point — more hours does not reliably mean more learning. And homework that’s bolted on with no clear link to that day’s lesson, marked with no feedback, tends to show much weaker effects than homework that’s treated as a genuine extension of classroom learning.

Put plainly: for a primary-age child, the evidence for homework’s academic payoff is real but modest, and a missed or rushed reading log is not derailing their education. For a secondary-age pupil, the case for homework — done well — is stronger, but “done well” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. A pile of repetitive, disconnected worksheets doesn’t automatically become effective just because a teenager, rather than a seven-year-old, is the one resenting it.

Why homework so often becomes a battleground

If homework’s academic case is real but bounded, why does it generate such disproportionate conflict? A few things are usually going on at once, and none of them are about your child being difficult or you being insufficiently firm.

First, timing works against everyone. Homework typically lands at the point in the day when a child (and often the adult supervising them) has the least self-regulation left. School already asks children to sit still, concentrate, manage frustration and follow instructions for six-plus hours; homework then asks for another round of exactly that, right when the tank is closest to empty. Adults recognise this pattern from their own working days — it’s much easier to be patient and focused at 9am than at 6pm.

Second, the relationship changes. At school, a teacher holds a certain kind of authority and a certain kind of emotional distance; getting something wrong in front of a teacher doesn’t carry the same weight as getting it wrong in front of a parent. At home, homework runs through the parent-child bond, which is loaded with love, worry, and — if we’re honest — some of our own hopes and anxieties about how our child is doing. That’s part of why a homework disagreement can escalate so much faster than the same disagreement would with a teaching assistant.

Third, there’s often a genuine mismatch between what’s being asked and what a parent can actually deliver. Methods change — the way long multiplication or phonics is taught today may not be the way you were taught it — and a well-meaning parent “helping” with the family’s own method can genuinely confuse a child, or leave both of you convinced the other is wrong. Research on parenting and homework backs this up: when parents feel anxious about their child falling behind, they tend to become more directive and controlling in the moment, which tends to increase resistance and lower the child’s own motivation rather than settle things down. A 2024 study on parental structure and homework anxiety in primary-age children found that structure — predictable routines and calm boundaries — reduced anxiety and supported motivation, while chaos in the home environment tended to do the opposite, regardless of how much time parents were putting in.

It’s also worth saying plainly, because it tends to relieve rather than add guilt: research reviewing decades of studies on parental involvement in homework has generally found that heavy, hands-on, correcting-every-line involvement doesn’t reliably raise grades, and can chip away at a child’s growing independence and confidence in their own ability to work things out. The instinct to lean in and fix it is a loving one. It’s just not, on the evidence, the thing doing the heavy lifting.

Practical ways to lower the temperature

None of this means giving up on homework altogether, or that structure doesn’t matter — quite the opposite. The strategies with the best track record are mostly about reducing the number of decisions and negotiations that happen in the moment, since decision fatigue is a big part of what turns a ten-minute task into a forty-minute row.

Same time, same place, most nights

A consistent slot and a consistent spot — even a modest one, like the kitchen table after a snack rather than straight off the school run — removes one whole layer of nightly negotiation. The predictability itself is doing work here: when “when do we do it” isn’t up for debate every evening, there’s less territory for a bigger argument to start on. It doesn’t need to be the same time every single day if your family’s rhythm doesn’t allow that, but a repeatable pattern — homework happens after tea, before screens, say — gives a child something to anticipate rather than resist.

Break it into chunks, and build in breaks

Long, undivided stretches of homework are hard for most children, and especially hard for children who find sustained attention effortful, including many children with SEN. Splitting a task into smaller visible steps, or using a simple timer for short focused bursts with a deliberate break in between, tends to make the work feel more manageable and less like an endless wall. This isn’t a trick to get more work out of a reluctant child — it’s a genuine accommodation for how attention actually works, and it’s worth using even for children who don’t have a diagnosed additional need.

Listen before you try to fix it

When a child is frustrated, naming what you’re seeing — “this is really annoying you” — before jumping to solve the maths problem tends to defuse things faster than problem-solving first. It sounds slow in the moment, but skipping it usually costs more time overall, because a child who feels unheard will keep escalating until they are heard, one way or another.

Help without taking over

Sit nearby rather than hovering over the page. Ask a question rather than supplying the answer — “what do you think the first step is?” rather than doing the first step for them. Let a few things stay imperfect. A piece of homework that’s slightly wrong but genuinely the child’s own work is more useful to the teacher, and to the child, than one that’s correct because a parent quietly took over.

Praise the effort, not just the right answer

How you respond to a wrong answer sets the tone for the next one. A child who expects a sigh or a correction the moment they get something wrong will start guarding against being wrong at all — which, in practice, often looks like refusing to start, or insisting they “don’t get it” before they’ve properly tried. Noticing the attempt (“you worked through the whole page even though it was tricky”) rather than only the accuracy tends to keep a child willing to have a go, which matters more over a school year than any single correct answer does.

For families who want a lower-friction way to get some structured practice done without the parent needing to know the exact method being taught this term, tools like Learnaroo Hub’s practice resources are built to let a child work at their own pace with feedback built in — which can take some of the “am I teaching this the wrong way” tension out of an evening.

When a note to the teacher beats a fight at the table

Sometimes the right response to a stuck child isn’t more effort, it’s a full stop and a note. If you’ve had a genuine go — using the strategies above, giving it a reasonable amount of time for your child’s age — and it’s still not landing, forcing it through to a “finished” state can actually work against the point of homework. Teachers use homework partly to see what a child can and can’t yet do independently; a page that’s technically complete because a parent supplied the method or the answers gives a misleading picture of where that child actually is.

A short, factual note does the job better than either battling on or quietly abandoning the task: something like “We spent 20 minutes on this and got stuck at question 4 — could you go over long division with her again?” is genuinely useful information for a teacher, not an admission of failure. Most teachers would rather have that note than a suspiciously perfect page, or a page with tear stains on it.

When it’s the load itself, not one bad night

One difficult evening is normal. A pattern is worth raising with the school. It’s worth getting in touch if homework is regularly taking far longer than it reasonably should for your child’s age and stage, if instructions are consistently unclear or the work is genuinely inaccessible to your child even with support, or if it’s repeatedly costing sleep, confidence, or family peace rather than the occasional bad night.

Before you raise it, a short written record helps enormously — a rough note of what’s been set and how long it actually took over a week or two turns a vague impression (“homework is a nightmare at the moment”) into something concrete a teacher can actually act on. Start with the class teacher or form tutor, since they set the work and can adjust it fastest; if your child has an additional need, the SENCO is often the better first port of call, since reasonable adjustments to homework are a normal and expected part of SEN support, not a special favour. If a first conversation doesn’t shift anything, a head of year is a reasonable next step for older pupils.

You’re not being difficult by raising it, and you don’t need to arrive with a complaint — a genuine question (“is 45 minutes normal for this, because it’s taking closer to 90 most nights”) is exactly the kind of thing schools want to hear before a small mismatch turns into a child who dreads school itself. Teachers generally can’t see how homework is landing at home; you’re often the only person with that information, which makes you the right person to share it.

It’s worth knowing, too, that England’s Department for Education dropped its old national homework-time guidance some years ago, which means individual schools now set their own homework policies rather than following one fixed national standard. In practice this means there genuinely isn’t one “correct” amount of homework your child should be doing — schools vary a good deal, and a policy that isn’t working for your particular child is a legitimate thing to query rather than something you have to assume is fixed and non-negotiable.

A rough homework night isn’t a parenting failure

Studies of family homework stress consistently find the same thing: conflict around homework is common, it shows up across income levels and education levels, and it tends to cluster on the evenings when everyone is already tired rather than reflecting anything stable about how well a family is doing overall. If tonight involved raised voices, a torn worksheet, or a child declaring they’re “the worst at maths in the entire world,” that’s a hard evening, not a verdict.

The evidence points somewhere genuinely reassuring: homework’s academic benefit, especially at primary age, is real but modest, which means the stakes of any single session are lower than they feel in the moment. What seems to help most isn’t more hours or more parental correction — it’s calm, predictable structure, tasks broken into a manageable size, permission to stop and write a note when something isn’t working, and knowing when a pattern is worth a conversation with school rather than another week of gritting your teeth. Reset tomorrow. The relationship carries far more weight, over time, than any single spelling test.

There’s a particular kind of tired that comes from a Sunday evening spent triple-marking thirty exercise books, writing a comment, leaving space for a pupil response, then writing a second comment underneath their response, in a different colour pen, because that’s what the policy says. If you’ve done it, you’ll know it rarely felt like the thing that was actually going to move a Year 8 class forward in fractions or a Year 10 group forward in their essay structure. It felt like proof. Proof for someone else that you’d done your job.

That feeling wasn’t imagined, and it wasn’t just you being inefficient. It was, for a long stretch of the last fifteen years, genuinely what a lot of schools expected, and it grew from a fairly thin evidence base. Here’s what the research actually says works, where deep and triple marking came from, and how to give feedback that helps pupils improve without quietly wrecking your evenings.

How triple marking became “what good teachers do”

Deep marking, triple marking, dialogic marking, the purple pen of progress: different schools gave it different names, but the shape was similar. A teacher marks the work in detail, often with a written comment against a success criterion. The pupil responds, sometimes correcting an error, sometimes answering a question the teacher has posed. The teacher then marks the response too, closing what got called the “feedback loop.”

None of this was ever a national requirement. But through the early 2010s, a mix of pressures pushed it from “something a few outstanding lessons did well” into “what every book scrutiny expected to see.” Senior leaders under pressure to demonstrate progress to inspectors pointed to visible, dated, colour-coded evidence in books as the easiest thing to show a visitor in thirty seconds. Some multi-academy trusts wrote it into whole-school policy as a way of standardising practice across dozens of schools at once. Individual examples of thorough marking, praised in specific lesson observations, got generalised into “this is what all marking should look like, in every subject, every week.” Once a few schools were doing it and being held up as exemplars, the practice spread through book scrutinies, learning walks and mock inspections, largely detached from any evidence that it actually helped pupils learn more than simpler approaches did.

By 2015, the government’s own workload surveys were showing that marking was one of the biggest single drivers of teachers’ unmanageable hours, and headteachers and unions were both raising it as a retention issue. In response, the Department for Education set up the Independent Teacher Workload Review Group, chaired by Dawn Copping, specifically to look at marking. Its 2016 report, Eliminating unnecessary workload around marking, is blunt about what it found: extensive, deep, or triple marking had little to no evidence behind it as a driver of pupil progress, and in many schools it had become, in the group’s words, a “time-wasting burden for teachers that has to stop.”

The report is also direct about where responsibility sat. It found that heavy marking regimes were frequently being driven not by pupils’ learning needs but by a wish to satisfy “other, mainly adult, audiences” — senior leaders, governors, inspectors — rather than to move a pupil’s understanding on. Crucially, the report traced this back to a misreading of what Ofsted actually required. Ofsted’s own position, restated clearly in the review, is that inspectors do not expect to see any specific frequency, type or volume of marking; how work is checked and responded to is for the school to decide through its own assessment policy, and inspectors are meant to judge only whether that policy is being followed, not whether it matches some unwritten gold standard of purple-penned dialogue.

That distinction matters enormously, because it means a great deal of the marking load teachers carried, and in some schools still carry, was never actually imposed from outside. It was a defensive practice, schools protecting themselves against an inspection expectation that didn’t exist in the form everyone assumed it did.

What the evidence says actually helps pupils improve

If triple marking wasn’t the answer, what is? The most useful single source here is the Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report, Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning, published in 2021 after a systematic review of the international evidence combined with input from practising teachers and school leaders. It’s worth reading in full if you get the chance, because it deliberately avoids prescribing a single method, and instead sets out principles that hold regardless of whether the feedback ends up written, verbal, whole-class or one-to-one.

The report’s core message is that feedback only works when it sits on top of good teaching, not instead of it. Its recommendations, in broad terms, are:

Lay the foundations for effective feedback through high-quality initial instruction and careful formative assessment, so you actually know what a pupil has and hasn’t understood before you comment on it.
Deliver appropriately timed feedback that focuses on moving learning forward, rather than simply flagging what went wrong.
Plan for how pupils will receive and act on feedback, because feedback that nobody reads, understands or has time to apply doesn’t do anything.
Carefully consider how to give written feedback, choosing methods that are proportionate to what they add.
Carefully consider how to give purposeful verbal feedback, which the evidence treats as equally legitimate to written feedback, not a lesser substitute for it.
Design a school feedback policy that supports and exemplifies these principles, while leaving decisions about specific methods and timing to teachers’ own professional judgement.

Two things stand out from that list. First, specificity matters more than volume: feedback that tells a pupil exactly what to do next, tied to a clear learning goal, consistently outperforms generic praise or generic correction, however much of it there is. Second, the EEF is explicit that a policy should never mandate a single method of feedback delivery across every subject and every lesson, because what works for correcting a maths calculation is not the same as what works for developing an extended piece of historical writing.

It’s also worth knowing what feedback can achieve when it’s done well. The EEF’s wider Teaching and Learning Toolkit, which reviews evidence across dozens of classroom strategies, rates feedback as one of the highest-impact approaches available to teachers, associated with an average of around six additional months’ progress for pupils compared with those who don’t receive it, and at very low cost. That’s a genuinely strong effect. The catch, which the guidance report spends most of its length unpacking, is that the size of that effect depends entirely on the quality and specificity of the feedback, not on how many hours were spent producing it.

Whole-class feedback: the lower-workload alternative with evidence behind it

The practice that’s grown fastest in schools trying to follow both the DfE workload report and the EEF guidance is whole-class feedback, sometimes called WCF. Instead of writing an individual comment in every book, the teacher reads through a set of work, notes the common errors, misconceptions and standout examples of good practice on a single sheet or slide, and then delivers that feedback to the whole class at the start of the next lesson. Pupils then respond directly in their books: correcting a specific error, attempting a follow-up question, or redrafting a section, guided by what’s been shared.

Done well, this does several things that individual deep marking often doesn’t. It lets a teacher read a full set of books once, at a reasonable pace, rather than writing bespoke commentary thirty times over. It means every pupil gets feedback on the actual patterns in their own work, because the teacher has genuinely read it, rather than a rotating set of generic stock phrases. And because the feedback is delivered and then acted on in lesson time, pupils get a structured chance to do something with it immediately, which is exactly the “plan for how pupils receive and use feedback” principle the EEF guidance emphasises. Several secondary schools that have documented their move to whole-class feedback report a substantial cut in weekly marking time, without a corresponding drop in the quality of what pupils actually receive, and in some cases with clearer, more actionable comments than they were managing under a triple-marking regime.

None of this means whole-class feedback is automatically better in every context. A one-word spelling correction on a piece of extended writing might genuinely need an individual comment; a common misconception about equivalent fractions across an entire class is exactly what whole-class feedback is built for. The point isn’t to replace one rigid rule with another. It’s to match the method to what will actually help pupils improve, and to stop assuming that “individual and lengthy” automatically means “more effective.”

Verbal feedback has a real place, not a lesser one

Verbal feedback sometimes gets treated in school policies as the poor relation of written comments, something you do when you haven’t had time to “properly” mark. The evidence doesn’t support that hierarchy. Live, in-the-moment feedback, given while you’re circulating during independent work, has a real advantage that no written comment can match: it arrives while the pupil is still doing the task, which means they can act on it immediately rather than three days later when the exercise book comes back and the thinking behind their original answer has gone cold.

The EEF guidance treats verbal feedback as sitting on exactly the same footing as written feedback, subject to the same underlying principles. That means it needs to be specific rather than a passing “good work,” it needs to give the pupil something concrete to do next, and ideally it needs some form of record, even a quick tick, initial or annotation in the book, so there’s a trace that it happened and what it covered, both for the pupil’s own reference and for anyone checking books later. A quiet word to a pupil that says exactly what to change in their next paragraph, followed by thirty seconds watching them make that change, can do more for their learning than a lengthy written comment they skim and forget. What matters is the same thing that matters for written feedback: is it specific, is it timely, and does the pupil actually get a chance to use it.

Why more marking doesn’t equal more learning

It’s worth sitting with why the “more marking, more progress” assumption took hold, because the logic behind it feels intuitive even once you know the evidence doesn’t back it up. Marking is visible. It produces a physical artefact — a book full of comments — that can be shown to a line manager, a governor, a parent at parents’ evening. Progress in a pupil’s actual understanding is much harder to see directly, so schools reached for the thing they could see instead, and treated it as a proxy.

But a proxy is not the same as the thing itself, and the 2016 DfE review was explicit that quantity and quality had been conflated. Spending longer on a comment doesn’t make it more useful to the pupil reading it; if anything, very long comments are more likely to bury the one thing a pupil actually needs to act on under several things that don’t matter as much. There’s also a workload economics problem specific to deep marking: if the teacher is doing substantially more cognitive work on a piece than the pupil originally put into it, the incentives get skewed. Pupils learn that mistakes get quietly fixed for them, or that the “real” work happens in the second, teacher-guided pass, which can undercut the very independence and resilience that good feedback is supposed to build.

None of this is an argument for marking less carefully. It’s an argument for marking differently: reading pupils’ work closely enough to spot the pattern that matters, saying that clearly, and then getting out of the way so pupils have to do the thinking themselves. That’s harder to standardise into a tick-box policy than “write a comment in green pen every lesson,” which is probably part of why it took a national workload crisis to shift practice at scale.

Following your school’s marking policy without the guilt

Most schools have moved a long way from triple marking since 2016, but plenty of teachers still carry some residual guilt about not doing “enough,” particularly if they trained during the deep-marking years or moved from a school where it was still the norm. A few practical ways to reconcile a sensible policy with a clear conscience:

Read your actual policy, not the version in your head. Many marking policies were rewritten after 2016 to explicitly allow whole-class feedback, verbal feedback and simple codes, but the memory of the old expectations lingers longer than the policy itself. Check what’s actually written down before assuming you owe more.
Use a consistent shorthand for routine errors. A shared set of codes for spelling, punctuation or a recurring misconception lets pupils correct their own work with your guidance, which is often more useful for their learning than you writing the correction out in full.
Batch your close reading, then deliver feedback live. Skim a set of books to identify the two or three things worth addressing, then spend the follow-up lesson on those points with the whole class, rather than writing the same comment thirty separate times.
Keep a light evidence trail for verbal feedback. A quick initial, tick or one-line note in the margin is usually enough to show feedback happened and roughly what it covered, without needing a full written commentary to accompany it.
Push back, calmly, with the evidence. If a line manager or book scrutiny asks for something beyond what your policy requires, both the EEF guidance and the DfE workload review are freely available, citable documents. It’s entirely reasonable to reference them in a conversation about what’s proportionate.
Protect the time you save for the feedback that actually needs it. Whole-class and verbal feedback should free up time for the pieces of work — the mock exam, the extended essay, the piece going towards a moderated assessment — where detailed individual comment genuinely earns its keep.

One practical drag on all of this is how long it takes to create fresh checking material in the first place, whether that’s a quick low-stakes quiz to establish what’s actually gone in before you plan your next lesson, or a set of retrieval questions to structure a whole-class feedback session around. Having a ready-made bank of curriculum-aligned quizzes and checks, like the ones built into Learnaroo Hub, can take that particular piece of the workload off your plate, leaving more of your time for the feedback conversation itself rather than the business of assembling questions to have that conversation about.

The uncomfortable truth about the deep-marking years is that a huge amount of good, well-intentioned teacher time went into something the evidence never really supported, largely because it was easier to point at than to argue against. The upside is that the correction is now well established, evidenced from two directions at once: a government workload review that named the problem plainly, and an EEF guidance report that sets out what to do instead. You don’t need to choose between helping pupils improve and protecting your evenings. The evidence suggests that, done well, the first genuinely makes the second easier, not harder.

Somewhere in most heads’ calendars is a conversation they’ve had more than once: a good teacher, sitting across the desk, handing in their notice. The instinct is to reach for the obvious explanation — pay, or Ofsted, or “the job’s just changed.” Sometimes that’s true. But the national data on why teachers actually leave is more specific than the staffroom folklore, and more useful, because some of it points at things a headteacher can genuinely change without waiting for a pay review or a policy shift from Westminster.

This matters because retention isn’t a soft HR concern sitting alongside the real business of school leadership. It’s a curriculum issue, a safeguarding issue and a budget issue all at once. Every departure that could have been prevented is a loss of continuity for pupils, a hole in the timetable, and a cost that rarely shows up as a single line in the budget but is felt across the whole year.

What actually predicts a teacher leaving — the data, not the folklore

The Department for Education’s Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders survey is the closest thing England has to a proper national pulse-check on this, and its 2024 wave (fieldwork January–May 2024, over 10,000 teachers and leaders, run by IFF Research and UCL’s Institute of Education) is uncomfortable reading. Thirty-six per cent of respondents said they were thinking about leaving teaching within the next 12 months, up from 25% two years earlier. Job satisfaction fell sharply too: only 46% said they were satisfied “most of the time,” down from 58% the previous year, and 19% said they were rarely satisfied at all.

Ask people what’s actually driving that, and the answers cluster tightly. NFER’s synthesis of the same working-lives data found that 90% of teachers who were considering leaving in 2023/24 cited high workload as a factor. The DfE survey itself found stress or poor wellbeing cited by 84%, and feeling undervalued by 83%. Pay matters — more on that below — but it isn’t the headline reason teachers give when you actually ask them. Workload, stress and feeling undervalued are.

What’s genuinely useful for a head is that the “why” differs by phase, and that difference tells you where to look first. In primary schools, 78% of those considering leaving cited pressure relating to pupil outcomes or inspection. In secondary schools, 59% pointed to pupil behaviour. In special schools and PRUs, 54% cited a lack of support from superiors and 44% a lack of progression opportunities. That’s not one problem with one fix — it’s three different working environments producing three different pressure points, and a retention strategy that treats them as identical will miss most of what’s actually going on in your building.

There’s a wellbeing gap between leaders and classroom teachers worth noting too. The same survey found 63% of teachers said work had negatively affected their mental health, against 55% of leaders — but leaders were more likely to feel supported (78% agreed their line manager supported their wellbeing, versus 62% of teachers) and more likely to have access to support schemes (79% versus 54%). Heads often assume their staff have roughly the access and support they themselves have. The data says that’s usually not true.

NFER’s most recent Teacher Labour Market in England report adds a cautious note of progress: 26% of teachers described their workload as acceptable in 2024/25, up from just 17% in 2021/22, and vacancy rates eased slightly. But the same report flags pupil behaviour as one of the fastest-growing contributors to workload since the pandemic, and recommends an independent review of behaviour-related workload and pastoral care specifically — which lines up closely with what secondary teachers are telling the DfE survey directly.

Leaving teaching altogether is a different problem from leaving your school

It’s worth being precise about a distinction that gets flattened in most retention conversations: a teacher who moves to the school down the road and a teacher who leaves the profession entirely are not experiencing the same problem, even if both show up as “attrition” in your workforce figures.

Research on teacher movement consistently shows that changing schools is driven mainly by local, immediate working conditions — leadership style, workload distribution, team culture, how supported someone feels day to day. Leaving the profession altogether tends to be driven by broader, more structural dissatisfaction: workload as a whole way of working, pay relative to other graduate careers, and a sense that the job itself has changed for the worse. Research summarised by the Chartered College of Teaching notes that a meaningful proportion of teachers who leave state schools — around half — don’t leave education at all: they move into the independent sector or into teaching-related roles rather than exiting the profession outright. That’s a real signal. It suggests that for a large group of departures, the problem isn’t “teaching” as a vocation, it’s the specific conditions of the specific school they were in.

That distinction should change how you read your own leavers list. Someone moving three miles down the road to a school with a calmer behaviour system and a lighter meeting load is telling you something fixable and local. Someone leaving the sector entirely after fifteen years is telling you something bigger, and while you can’t single-handedly fix national pay policy, you can still influence whether your school was the reason they gave up, or the reason they stayed as long as they did.

What you can actually change, even though pay and Ofsted aren’t up to you

It’s tempting to treat retention as something that lives entirely outside a headteacher’s control — set by pay review bodies and inspection frameworks neither of which you get a vote on. That’s true of the two biggest national levers. It is not true of the four things the data says matter most day to day.

Workload culture

Workload doesn’t mean “the job is hard.” It means the accumulation of marking policies, planning expectations, meeting frequency and administrative asks that a school chooses to run, largely independently of what any external body actually requires. Auditing what you genuinely ask of staff against what you’re actually obliged to provide is usually the single highest-leverage exercise a leadership team can do, and it costs nothing but time. Ready-made, curriculum-aligned planning and marking resources — something like Learnaroo Hub’s teacher library — can shave a modest amount off the weekly grind for some staff, but it’s one small lever among several, not a substitute for genuinely reducing what a school asks of its teachers.

Behaviour support

Given that pupil behaviour is the single most cited reason secondary teachers consider leaving, and one of the fastest-growing drivers of workload nationally, a consistent, visibly-backed whole-school behaviour system is a retention intervention as much as a discipline one. The specific thing staff report valuing isn’t a stricter policy on paper — it’s knowing that when they call for support, someone senior actually shows up. A behaviour policy nobody enforces is worse for retention than having no policy at all, because it signals the gap between what leadership says and what leadership does.

Career development

This mattered most acutely in special schools and PRUs, where 44% of those considering leaving cited a lack of progression opportunities, but it isn’t confined to that phase. Career development doesn’t have to mean a promotion pipeline everyone can’t realistically climb — it can mean protected CPD time that isn’t quietly cancelled under pressure, honest conversations about what a TLR or a subject lead role would actually involve, and making sure good teachers know you’ve noticed them before they start looking elsewhere for someone who will.

Feeling heard

Eighty-three per cent citing “feeling undervalued” as a factor in considering leaving is not a small number, and it’s not fixed by an end-of-term email thanking staff for their hard work. It’s fixed by staff seeing a visible link between something they raised and something that changed. A staff survey that never produces a visible outcome trains people to stop bothering to answer it honestly — which then quietly poisons your ability to read the room at all.

The real cost when a good teacher walks

The cost of losing a teacher rarely appears as one number in a budget, which is part of why it’s easy to underweight against more visible pressures. It sits across several lines: the direct cost of recruitment and advertising, the cost of supply cover while a post sits vacant or a replacement gets up to speed, and the much harder to quantify cost of lost institutional knowledge — the relationships with pupils and parents, the informal understanding of “how this department works,” the mentoring capacity that walks out with an experienced colleague.

On supply cover specifically, one widely cited (if now dated) analysis put annual spending on supply teachers across England’s schools at around £821m, roughly £168 per pupil — and schools sourcing cover through an agency typically pay 20–30% above the base daily rate once agency margins are added. Many schools now set aside dedicated budget lines specifically to absorb this, sometimes running into tens of thousands of pounds a year for a single school, precisely because unplanned absence and vacancy cover has become a predictable, recurring cost rather than an occasional shock.

The harder-to-cost part is what happens to the colleagues who stay. Every vacancy left unfilled, or filled by short-term supply, means someone else absorbing cover lessons, extra planning, or a class that’s now unsettled by a run of different adults in front of it. That’s a direct line back to the workload data above: unfilled vacancies don’t just cost money, they actively worsen the workload pressure that was probably part of why the last person left.

Running an exit interview that actually surfaces the truth

Most schools already do something called an exit interview. Fewer schools do one that produces honest information, because the format most commonly used — a form handed over on someone’s last week, or a conversation with the line manager they may have specific grievances about — is almost engineered to produce polite, non-committal answers.

A few practical changes make a genuine difference:

Someone other than the direct line manager should conduct it. A teacher leaving partly because of how a department is run will not tell the head of that department the real reason, however well-intentioned that person is.
Timing matters. A conversation held weeks before departure, once a new job is secured and there’s nothing left to lose by being candid, tends to produce far more useful information than one held on the final day when the instinct is simply to leave on good terms.
Confidentiality has to be real, not just stated. If staff have any reason to believe specifics will be traced back to them, or fed straight to the person they’re describing, they’ll default to vague, safe answers.
Ask about specifics, not generalities. “Was there a particular week, meeting or decision that made you start looking?” tends to surface more than “Why are you leaving?”
Look for the pattern across leavers, not the story in any one interview. One person’s account might be about a personality clash. Three people independently describing the same meeting structure or the same unsupported behaviour incident is a systemic finding, and it needs to be treated as one.
Close the loop. If exit interviews consistently flag something and nothing visibly changes, current staff will hear about it through the grapevine just as reliably as they’d hear about a positive change — and it will cost you the credibility of every future survey and interview you run.

It’s also worth running the mirror version of this with staff who stay: a short, low-pressure “stay interview” for people a few years into post, asking what’s keeping them and what would tip the balance the other way. It costs almost nothing and often surfaces the same themes as exit interviews, but early enough to act on them.

Retention is a hundred small decisions, not one big one

There is no single lever that fixes teacher retention, and any advice that promises one should be treated with suspicion. National pay and inspection policy sit outside any individual head’s control, and pretending otherwise sets an impossible bar. But the data is consistent, from the DfE’s own national survey through to NFER’s labour market analysis: workload, behaviour support, feeling valued and a credible route for career development are the things staff actually cite, and every one of them is shaped, in practice, by decisions a school makes about its own culture.

The heads who keep good staff longest aren’t necessarily running the calmest schools or the best-resourced ones. They’re the ones where the gap between what leadership says it values and what it actually asks of people day to day is smallest — and where, when someone does eventually walk, the school is honest enough with itself to find out why.

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