This is a tricky one to write about because it can sound like finger-pointing.

I promise it isn’t.

Parents are busy. Life is busy. Children are busy. The school calendar alone sometimes feels like it was designed by someone actively trying to ruin your week.

PE kit.

Own clothes day.

Homework.

Spellings.

After school clubs.

Tutoring.

School trips.

Forms that needed to be returned yesterday.

So no, this isn’t about blaming parents for not being perfectly organised all the time, but organisation really does matter.

This is because children usually learn better when they know what to expect.

One of the hardest things about supporting your child is that sometimes their struggles look horribly familiar.

Your child loses track of time, forgets where they put things, struggles to focus unless they’re genuinely interested in something, finds certain social situations confusing, draining or difficult to read.

Maybe you’ve spent years feeling the same way, even if you never quite put it into words.

Of course, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes parents are amazed by how different their child is from them. A very organised parent may have a child whose school bag looks like it’s been packed by a chimpanzee. A confident, sociable parent may have a child who finds group situations exhausting.

But often, we do see patterns running through families.

I have a confession to make…

I was never a strong reader.

I enjoyed reading and I was ‘good at it’ (whatever that means), but I struggled to find books I enjoyed and often gave up on recommended reading.

My older brother, however, was a voracious reader. So was my best friend. They devoured books like chocolate cake and, although I liked the idea of getting lost in a novel, the disappointment at failing to be meant that I dubbed myself a ‘bad reader.’

I managed to discover my love of books later in my teens, after breaking a few rules and finding my own way into it.

While the benefits of reading are widely known, it’s never been harder to encourage children to read.

For many parents, the school interview is something that feels hardest to prepare for.

You can support your child to practise exam papers, memorise complex vocabulary, work on comprehension, creative writing and reasoning.

But an interview?

That’s a different sort of pressure. A pressure that even we, as adults, struggle with.

Suddenly, your child has to walk into a room, meet an adult, or adults, they don’t know and talk about themselves, their interests, their opinions and why they want to join a particular school - something they have almost certainly never experienced before.

What if they freeze? What if they say “I don’t know”? What if they mumble, ramble or accidentally make themselves sound like they’ve never had a thought in their life, and all that hard work goes to waste?

The good news is that school interviews are not about perfect answers.

They’re about showing the person behind the exam result.

We all know reading matters.

It helps children build vocabulary, follow stories, absorb sentence patterns and become stronger at comprehension.

But what about TV?

Historically, TV gets treated or perceived as the enemy of learning.

Too much screen time. Too much noise. Too much staring into the middle distance with anxiety attack-inducing music and sound-effects.

And yes, if a child is just sitting there for hours with no thought, no conversation and no engagement, it’s probably not doing much for their English, or communication skills.

But TV itself isn’t always the problem, it’s what happens around it.

Used properly, TV can be a brilliant prompt for creative writing, inference and storytelling.

When it comes to GCSE essay writing, introductions often get treated as something to get through quickly.

A few sentences at the start before the “real” essay begins.

But that’s a big mistake, as a good introduction makes all the difference.

It is the first impression. It is the moment the examiner sees that the student understands the question, know what they are being asked to do and have something worth saying.

As your child moves towards their GCSEs, essay writing starts to matter more and more - and not just for English.

Somewhere along the way, they will probably meet a growing list of essay acronyms.

PEE. PEA. PEEL. PEAL. PETAL. PERSI. Possibly several others, depending on the school, exam board or sacred law that only that one teacher adheres to.

So which one is the right one?

The honest answer is: it’s probably not the thing worth panicking about.

If you want a fun way to build your child’s critical thinking and reasoning skills, one of the best games you can play is probably one you already know.

Would You Rather?

Just two options and one simple question:

“Which would you choose?”

The magic is not really in the answer.

It’s in the explanation.

Engaging with classic literature can be hard work for a child.

Not because they aren’t clever enough to understand it, or because the stories are too old, or so dated they don’t make any sense.

It’s often because the language gets in the way.

Old-fashioned references. Archaic vocabulary. Long, winding sentences that seem to go on forever. Dense descriptions that can turn a young reader off, before the story has even had a chance to begin.

“Have you checked it?”

“Yes...”

Every parent has had this conversation.

Your child finishes their homework, you ask whether they’ve checked it, they say they have, and then you glance at it and immediately spot three missing full stops, ten spelling mistakes and a sentence that appears to have wandered off halfway through and never come back.

So what’s going on? Are they being lazy?

No, not necessarily.

The truth is that most children are not naturally good at checking their own work. And there are a couple of very understandable reasons why.

If I had to give just one piece of creative writing advice that works at almost any age and ability level, it would be this:

Vary your sentence lengths.

That's it. Not fancy vocabulary. No complicated techniques.

Just change the length of your sentences.

It sounds almost too simple, but it makes an enormous difference.

One of the most common traps in 11+ verbal reasoning is surprisingly simple.

Most children understand the basic idea of synonyms:

• big = large

• quick = fast

• silent = quiet

But verbal reasoning questions are designed to test precision of thinking, not just general understanding. And that’s where associated words start causing trouble.

They test how well you communicate what you know.

One of the biggest misconceptions about exams is the idea that exams simply test how much a student knows.

They don’t - exams are not mind-reading machines.

A student might understand a text brilliantly. They might have insightful ideas, thoughtful opinions and strong subject knowledge. But if they can’t organise those thoughts clearly and communicate them effectively on paper, the examiner can’t reward what never properly arrives on the page.

If your child is preparing for a reasoning test — verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, critical thinking assessments — it’s very easy to become obsessed with scores, timings and getting the right answer.

But the bigger opportunity is often being missed, because reasoning isn’t about the correct answers.

It’s about how you came to find an answer. It’s about how you think.

And arguably, the reasoning behind an answer is just as important as the answer itself. Maybe even more important if you care about the long-term picture beyond standardised tests.

Flashcards can be useful.

They’re good for introducing new words in a manageable way. They’re good for testing whether a child recognises a definition.

But here’s the issue.

The real learning doesn’t happen at either of those points.

It happens in between.

Verbal and non-verbal reasoning tests were originally designed to measure what psychologists called fluid intelligence. The idea was that these tests assessed something fixed. An innate ability. A kind of built-in mental capacity that couldn’t really be taught.

If that were true, preparation would be pointless.

But it isn’t strictly true.

When children struggle in English, it’s rarely because they lack ideas.

More often, it’s because those ideas are out of balance.

Success in English depends on proportion. On knowing how much of something to include, where to place it and how to blend it properly.

If you want your child to become a better writer, one of the most effective places to start is with speaking.

That might sound surprising.

But strong speaking and strong writing are deeply connected.

Vocabulary isn’t just about sounding clever in an exam.

It shapes how we experience the world.

The words we choose don’t simply describe what’s happening around us. They influence how we interpret it. This idea is known as linguistic framing.

And it has far-reaching effects…

If two words are going to be synonyms or antonyms, they must be the same word type.

It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. In a timed test, though, it’s one of the easiest traps to fall into.