Parents, Step Back

A few days after a student’s onboarding session, a message sometimes arrives from a parent: where are the links, and when do the sessions run?

The onboarding session is built to answer exactly that question. In it, we go through the student’s dashboard together: where the session links are, when each session runs, and where their work is kept. Then we hand it back to them. Before the session ends, the student has to show us where the links are and tell us what work they have to do.

There are ordinary reasons for a message like that. The student may have forgotten, a page may look different from the one they were shown, or a login may have failed. None of those is a fault, and if something on our side has broken, that is ours to fix. Usually, though, nothing has broken, and the answer is sitting in the dashboard, in the place the student was shown.

Now suppose the question reaches you first, from your child, a few minutes before a session starts. What would you do? Most of us would find the link and send it, because that is quick and kind. The link will still be sitting in the same place next week, though, and every week for the next two years, so the real question is what that reply teaches.

The small jobs are the lesson

Planning a week, keeping track of what is due and finding what you need are real skills, which children learn by doing, badly at first. The Education Endowment Foundation, which reviews evidence for schools in England, describes helping children “set goals, plan, and manage their time, effort, and emotions” as often “more valuable than direct help with homework tasks”.^[1]

Helping a child build those habits and doing the job for them look identical from the doorway, yet one is a hand on the back of a bicycle saddle and the other is pedalling for them.

The obvious fix, when a child is stuck on the work itself, is to sit down beside them and help with it. A review of 448 studies, covering 480,830 families, found that children whose parents were involved in almost any way had slightly better results. There was one exception. Children whose parents helped with homework had lower results.^[2]

So should a parent stand back altogether? No. A study that followed 1,685 pupils over time, allowing for how well they were already doing, found that the kind of help mattered more than the amount. Children who felt the help was supportive made better progress, while children who felt it was intrusive made less.^[3] Two researchers who have spent their careers on the question put it in one sentence: involvement helps “particularly when such involvement is autonomy supportive and affectively positive”.^[4] In everyday words, that means help that is warm and leaves the child in charge of the work.

These studies describe patterns across many families, not a rule for any one family. It may also be that the difficulty comes first, since parents tend to help more when a child is already struggling. But the studies agree on the advice, which is to take an interest, keep expectations high, and leave the work with your child.

So go back to the message about the links. Finding them is part of the job. The reply that builds independence is the one that sends your child back to look.

Ask in the session, not after it

Every student on our full programme has three live sessions with a tutor each week: a two-hour Deep Work session, the one-hour Live Modelling session, and a Strategy Session in which their own work is gone through one by one. Those sessions are where questions belong. Ask one there and the answer comes while the paragraph is still on the screen, with the tutor and the student reading the same line, so it can be tried straight away. Send the same question by message the next day and the writing is closed, so the answer arrives with nothing in front of the student to try it on.

Almost every difficulty a student has can be settled inside those sessions. Learning to raise it there is the habit we want them to build.

When a question reaches us through a parent, the chain gets longer. We answer the parent. The parent explains it to the student. The student gets a second-hand version and has still never practised asking. The next time something is unclear, the same route is the natural one to take. Over a year that builds a student who has had a great deal explained to them and has almost never had to say “I don’t understand this part” to a teacher. Saying it out loud is one of the things the next two years are for.

So the default we ask for is that the student brings the question to their next session. A message to us between sessions is not wrong, and we will answer it, but it is the second choice, because the help that solves the problem is already on the timetable. We would rather students used it at the hour it is there.

There are also things you should send us yourself, because they are quicker to settle when they come straight from you. They include a problem that keeps coming back after the student has raised it, anything to do with wellbeing, anything about getting into the platform or a session, and a child who needs more support than the sessions can give.

“The lesson didn’t help” can mean two things

Sometimes a session ends and a student tells their parent they did not learn anything. When that happens, two things are true at once.

First, what a student feels they have learned and what they can actually do are two different measurements, which can move in different directions. In a randomised study of university physics students, taught with identical materials, the group in active, demanding classes learned more but reported learning less. The researchers found that the extra effort was part of what made them feel that way.^[5] That was a university lecture hall, not a GCSE English session, so we take only the general point from it. The feeling is real information about the student’s experience, but on its own it does not measure what they took away.

Second, the session itself may genuinely have gone wrong. A step may have been taught too fast, or the session may have relied on a word nobody had taught the student yet. The student may have been lost from the first ten minutes and unable to say so. Research on tutoring found that students who asked better questions did better, but also that students “need training to improve these skills”.^[6] Sitting quietly does not necessarily mean a student is disengaged, because they may not yet know where their own confusion starts. Finding that point with them is part of what we are for.

So when a student says a session did not help, we look at both halves. We ask what they understood, what they can now do that they could not do before, and where exactly it stopped making sense. On our side, we ask what the teaching actually enabled, and what needs teaching again or differently. Their marked work is where those questions get answered, because it shows what a student can do rather than what anyone felt.

Send them back with the question

You do not need to understand the difficulty. You are not the student, and a problem buried inside an analytical paragraph is not something a parent can be expected to diagnose. What a student needs from home is simpler than that: to be sent back to us with the question.

Every session is built to take questions. In Live Modelling we check understanding as we go, give time to ask, and before the session ends we ask whether anyone has a question left. In the Strategy Session the student’s own work is gone through one by one, and in Deep Work a tutor is in the room for two hours. A student who leaves a session confused had several chances to say so. They will have several more next week.

What goes wrong, in our experience, happens more quietly. The student says nothing in the session, closes the laptop, and tells you at home that they were confused. From where you sit, that can look as though the tutor you are investing in is not helping. Almost always, the question was never asked.

So the reply that helps is short, warm, firm and the same every time: “Ask your tutor. Take it to Deep Work, or to the Strategy Session.” The research on help-seeking gives one reason to keep it warm: children who feel connected ask for help more, and children who feel unable tend to hide the problem instead.^[7] We think a child who is made to feel that being confused is a failing will hide the next difficulty. A tutor cannot answer a question they never hear.

Our part, your part, their part

Our part is teaching that is clear, instructions a fourteen-year-old can follow without help, marking that says what to fix and how, checks that the teaching landed, and changes to the teaching whenever it did not land.

Your part is the routine and the expectation: sessions attended, work attempted, and concerns raised with us plainly when something is not right.

Their part is the learning: they attempt the work, they use the feedback on it, and they learn to notice when they are lost and to say so. That last skill is the one we most want a student to leave with, because no adult can do it on their behalf.

A lesson can be taught well and still need the student to pick it up. Sending them back to their tutor is how you put it in their hands. If you are not sure whether the teaching is working, we have written separately about how to check: How to Make Tuition Work.

Five things to do this week

1. When your child asks you for a link or a session time, answer with a question. “Where did they show you to find it?” Then wait while they look, because the waiting is the part that teaches.

2. Get the question into one sentence before the next session, and written down. A question a student can read out is a question they will ask, so do not answer it yourself.

3. When your child says a session did not help, ask where exactly it stopped making sense. Then send them back with that answer, rather than sending it for them.

4. Once a week, ask one real question about the work itself. Make it something about what they actually wrote, not “have you done it?”, as we described in How Parents Help or Hinder.

5. Message us yourself when it is bigger than one lesson. That means a difficulty still there a week later, anything touching wellbeing, or anything about getting into the platform or a session.

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