Who Is Responsible?

One morning in the summer of Year 11, your child will walk into an exam hall, find the desk with their candidate number on it, and turn over a paper that nobody in their life has seen. No teacher can lean over to explain a question, and no parent can wait beside the desk with the answer. For as long as that paper lasts, every adult who has helped your child, including us, will be on the other side of the door.

A much smaller version of that morning arrives much earlier, soon after a student joins our programme. We give them their timetable and their session links, and our onboarding sequence shows them where both are kept. Very often, the next day, a parent sends us a message asking what time the lessons are. Sometimes the parent has already logged in, seen the times in the dashboard, and wants us to confirm them while the family gets used to a new system.

When we get a message like this, we first ask ourselves one question: what did we not explain clearly? If a reminder would have helped, we send one. That is why every parent now gets an email and a text after the onboarding session. Both give the lesson times, say where the links are, and ask the parent to log in.

Then we think about the student. Knowing the lesson times helps a parent feel calm. But a student who can say when their lessons are, and find the links without help, has taken a first small step of responsibility. We would rather your child could do that for themselves than have someone else do it for them. So if your child asks you for a lesson time or a link, send them back to look in their dashboard. Finding it is part of the job, and the reply that builds independence is the one that sends them back to look. There is more on this in Parents, Step Back.

But there is a bigger question here: who is responsible for the learning?

A lesson needs two people

Suppose your child’s English has slipped, and they tell you the lessons are not helping. Where would you go first? The usual first step is to go to the school or the tutor and ask them to do more: more reminders, more checks and more pressure until the work comes in. Another common step is to change the tutor, and some parents even go to the school and ask for their child’s teacher to be changed.

Now think about what a teacher can actually make happen. A teacher decides what is taught, how it is explained, what the task is and what the feedback says. A good teacher also asks how to make the lesson better next time: whether the explanation could be clearer, whether students need more support, or whether the steps should come in a different order. What a teacher cannot decide is whether the student thinks hard about the explanation, attempts the task properly, or reads the feedback and uses it in the next essay. The first list is the teaching, and the second is the learning. Every reminder and every check belongs on the first list, while the second still waits for the student.

Small jobs from the second list often travel across to the first without anyone deciding to send them. A student who has not booked a session they were asked to book may send messages and make calls about it, when booking would take a minute. A parent who hears that their child missed the session may ask the school why, before asking the child. Both moves are natural. But in both, the question has travelled to the teacher while the job is still waiting with the student.

Learning is something a student does

A lesson does not fall on a student in the way that rain does. In the words of Barry Zimmerman, a psychologist who spent his career studying how students learn on their own, learning is “an activity that students do for themselves in a proactive way rather than as a covert event that happens to them in reaction to teaching”.^[1] The student has to do something with a lesson before it turns into learning.

We sometimes hear the opposite idea from students, in different words: “This method doesn’t work for me,” or “This teaching style doesn’t suit me.” Both sentences put the student at the centre, with the method expected to fit around them. It works the other way round. Every student is marked against the same criteria, whoever they are, and those criteria have stayed largely the same since the current GCSEs were first examined in 2017. So the useful question is not whether a method works for the student. The useful question is whether the student is changing how they write, so that their work meets the criteria. That change has to happen with any teacher and any method. The sooner a student accepts it, the sooner their work improves.

Picture two students in the same lesson, with the same teacher and the same model paragraph on the board. One copies the paragraph into their book, word for word. The other writes down, in their own words, why the paragraph works. Both look busy and leave with a page of notes.

The research of Michelene Chi and Ruth Wylie suggests that the second student is likely to learn more. They sorted what students do during the same task into four kinds of engagement, from simply receiving information to working on it with another person, and they argue that learning rises as the engagement deepens.^[2] Copying word for word sits at the bottom of their scale, while notes in a student’s own words usually ask for more, because the student has to draw their own conclusions. In the researchers’ words, “the manner in which students take notes influences their learning”.^[2] Their framework is supported by many studies, though not by every test of it, so we take only the general point.

The teacher has done the same job for both students, and the difference lies in what each of them did with the lesson.

More help can mean less effort

When a child is not taking charge of their work, the obvious fix is for an adult to take charge of it for them. A parent keeps the timetable, or a teacher follows up every missing task. Surely more support should mean more progress?

A study of adults suggests that the answer is not always yes. People who were asked to think about how their partner helped them with their academic goals “procrastinated more, leaving themselves less time for an academic task” than people in the comparison groups.^[3] The psychologists who ran it, Gráinne Fitzsimons and Eli Finkel, concluded from three studies that thinking about how someone else helps us with a goal can make us less willing to work at it ourselves.

The people in the study were adults thinking about a partner, not teenagers thinking about a parent, so the study cannot tell us what happens in your home. In our view, though, the same pattern explains much of what we see. When the parent knows the lesson time, the student has less reason to know it, and when the school is expected to make the work happen, the student has less reason to make it happen.

We have had to think about this in our own design. Each student books their own strategy session, a short meeting of ten to fifteen minutes with us. A student who has had no strategy session for two weeks, and has none booked, is now booked into one automatically. We tell students that an automatic booking means a step was missed, because a safety net carries the same risk as the partner in that study. A student who knows the net is there has less reason to book for themselves.

Feeling in control goes with doing well

One of the strongest links with a pupil’s achievement may sit inside the pupil rather than inside the school. A 1966 United States government survey of more than 645,000 pupils, led by the sociologist James Coleman, set out to measure how schools were linked to achievement.^[4] Among its findings was a pupil attitude factor “which appears to have a stronger relationship to achievement than do all the ‘school’ factors together”. That factor was “the extent to which an individual feels that he has some control over his own destiny”.^[4]

Coleman’s survey is old and American, and its figures show connections rather than causes. A pupil who is already doing well may feel more in control because of that success. Even so, the survey points the same way as the studies above.

Think about two ways a student might explain a disappointing essay. “I did not learn the quotations” names a cause inside the student, which the student can control. “The teacher never explains it properly” names a cause outside the student, which the student cannot control. The psychologist Bernard Weiner described three ways in which such causes differ: where the cause sits, whether it is likely to change, and whether we can control it.^[5] We think the second explanation is the more comfortable of the two and the less useful, because it leaves the student nothing to change before the next essay.

The same pull works on adults

Is the outside explanation a habit of teenagers? It is a habit of almost everyone. A review of 266 studies by Amy Mezulis and her colleagues found that people tend to credit themselves for good results and to look outside themselves for bad ones, in nearly every group that was studied.^[6] The tendency was strongest in children and in older adults, so a student who blames the lesson is doing something very ordinary.

Parents feel the same pull on their child’s behalf. In an Australian survey of 866 parents, Judith Locke and her colleagues found that the parents who were most involved in their child’s homework also gave the child’s teacher more responsibility for getting it done.^[7] Those parents did not give the child less responsibility, though. The teacher was added to the list, and the child stayed on it.

What a parent believes about the cause may still matter. In a study of 473 families in Cyprus, Stelios Georgiou found that children whose parents put their results down to the child’s own effort tended to achieve more.^[8] Like Coleman’s survey, the study shows a link rather than a cause, and the children were eleven and twelve. Even so, the first question at home is worth choosing with care. “Why did the school not tell you?” and “What happened when you tried to book it?” send a child in two different directions.

Responsibility is practised, not given

None of the research means that a student should be left to manage alone. Zimmerman himself wrote that the habits behind learning “can be learned from instruction and modeling by parents, teachers, coaches, and peers”, and that students who manage their own learning well “seek out help from others”.^[1] Asking for help is part of taking responsibility. In his view, teaching those habits is part of a teacher’s job, and yet “few teachers currently prepare students to learn on their own”.^[1]

That teaching is a gradual handover. The Education Endowment Foundation, which reviews evidence for schools in England, describes a first stage in which the teacher gives “support, prompts, and scaffolding”, after which “the pupil can assume more and more responsibility as they become more proficient”.^[9]

So responsibility passes from the adult to the child in steps, and each step the child takes forward needs the adult to take one back. If the adults never step back, the child never gets the practice. Our own view is that fifteen and sixteen are the ages when that practice matters most, because within two years the same student will be at a sixth form, a college or a job, where far fewer people will check on them.

Every family brings its habits

A new programme asks a family to change more than a timetable. It asks them to look for information in a new place, and most of us would rather keep the habits we already have. The economists William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser found that people “disproportionately stick with the status quo”, in experiments and in real choices such as pension schemes.^[10] That pull is in students, in parents and in teachers, and we include ourselves.

One habit we often see is a preference for messages. Some families would rather ask us by text than open the dashboard, which holds the progress report, the average grade, what is due next, your child’s own work and the time of every lesson. There are good reasons for that preference. A parent may read English as a second language, work late or have only a phone, and our system may not have been explained clearly enough. In a study across several hundred American schools, the economist Peter Bergman found that only 57 per cent of families ever used the school’s online system, that use was lower in poorer families, and that a simple reminder raised it.^[11]

So the gap is partly ours to close, and we have started to close it. The email and the text that each parent now receives after the onboarding session carry a link straight to the dashboard. In a second study, Bergman found that parents tended to believe their child was doing more work than the child really was, and that sending parents the facts improved results.^[12] A message to us will always be answered. The dashboard adds something a message cannot: a parent who can see a missed session can ask their child about it first.

A question helps more than a correction

After a mock, a parent will sometimes write to say that our method is not the school’s method, or that our mark must be wrong because the school gave a different one.

Most adults feel they know how teaching works, and there is a good reason for that feeling. By the end of school, a pupil has spent about 13,000 hours watching teachers at work. The sociologist Dan Lortie called this the “apprenticeship of observation”.^[13] His point was that a pupil sees what a teacher does at the front of the room, but not the planning and the judgement behind it. All those hours make teaching look simpler than it is.

Marking is a good example. In some ways we mark more strictly than an examiner would, and we do it on purpose. On AQA’s English Language Paper 1, the mark scheme gives marks for spelling and punctuation only in the final writing question. We take off half a mark in the reading answers too, for faults such as two sentences joined by a comma. We also take off half a mark when a student writes that a quotation “shows” something, where a verb such as “reveals” or “demonstrates” would explain what the writer is doing. In essays, we take off half a mark for words repeated without a purpose. So if our mark is higher than the school’s, our marking is not too generous. The difference has another cause, and we explain the usual causes in Why Your Tutor and Your Child’s School May Not Give the Same Grade.

So when a mark surprises you, ask us to explain it. Every mark has a reason, and we will show you where each one was lost.

How a disagreement is handled matters too, because the second cost falls on your child. When a child hears a parent correct the teacher, they learn that the teacher’s instructions are open to debate. In a study of 443 pupils aged six and seven in Texas, Jan Hughes and Oi-man Kwok found that pupils whose parents got on better with the teacher were more engaged in class, as their teachers rated it.^[14] The study shows a link rather than a cause, and the pupils were much younger than GCSE students. Even so, it points the same way as our experience. So bring a disagreement to us, away from your child.

In our first years of teaching, we tried to adjust to every correction like this. We learned that adjusting helped nobody. What helps is explaining our reasons to the parent and the student. After that, we make decisions from our own assessments of your child’s writing. We do not make them from the mood after a mock, or from a comment by someone who has never seen the work. We have taught students who scored a 5 in a mock, and students who cried at their mock result, who went on to score 9s.

So we will say it plainly. It is not a parent’s place to tell a teacher how to teach. A school has its own system, and its teachers have trained and qualified for the job. Teachers are not perfect, and like everyone they make mistakes. But one of the most common mistakes we see is a parent trying to tell a teacher how to teach better.

The same is true when the parent is a teacher. A parent who teaches maths knows a great deal about teaching maths. That knowledge does not tell them how to teach a student to write about a poem. The education researcher Lee Shulman showed that good teachers need a kind of knowledge that belongs to their own subject: which topics students find hard, which mistakes they make, and which examples make a topic clear.^[15] A maths teacher has that knowledge for maths, and an English teacher has it for English.

There is one exception. It has nothing to do with teaching. If a teacher’s behaviour ever puts your child at risk, report it to the school’s safeguarding lead straight away. Such cases are rare. In England, fewer than 200 teachers a year are banned from teaching for serious misconduct, out of more than 500,000.^[16][17]

In our experience, when a parent judges the teaching, the judgement is usually mistaken, and it confuses the child. If you are unsure about a method or a mark, ask us why, and we will explain. Your child’s job is to listen to the teacher and use the feedback. The most powerful thing a parent can do is help their child to listen, even on a day when the teaching does not look right to you.

Our part, your part, their part

Our part is to give your child teaching that is clear, instructions they can follow without help, feedback that shows what to fix and how to fix it, and checks on whether the teaching worked. Checking those four is our job, and we check them from your child’s own work.

Your part is the routine and the expectation. When Erika Patall, Harris Cooper and Jorgianne Robinson reviewed the research on parents and homework, they found that setting rules about homework had a stronger link to achievement than the other kinds of involvement they studied.^[18] A rule sets the conditions for the work, while the work itself stays with your child. When your child misses a step, ask them about it before you ask us. The questions a parent can ask at home are in How Parents Help or Hinder.

Their part is the learning itself: turning up prepared, attempting the work, reading the feedback and using it, and saying when they are lost. No adult, however willing, can do that part for them.

One morning in the summer of Year 11, the door of the exam hall will close, and your child will be the only one of us on the other side of it. Every link they find for themselves between now and then, every lesson time they remember and every piece of feedback they act on is practice for that morning.

Five things to do this week

1. Ask your child to explain where things are. Ask where their timetable, their session links and their latest feedback are kept, and let them answer in words rather than show you. If they cannot, they now know what to look up.

2. Hand one job over to your child. Choose one thing you currently do for your child, such as checking the lesson time or booking a session, and tell them that from this week it belongs to them. Then leave it with them, even the first time it goes wrong.

3. Listen for where your child puts the cause. When they explain a disappointing result, notice whether the cause is something they can change. If it is not, ask one question: “Which part of that could you change before the next essay?”

4. Set the rule, not the work. Agree with your child when and where English is done each week. Then leave the English itself to them.

5. Help your child to listen. When your child doubts a lesson or a mark, ask them what the feedback told them to change, and remind them that their job is to listen to the teacher and use it.

If you would like to know where your child’s own writing stands today, our free assessment takes five minutes.

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