wellbeing

For SATs Pupils

A readable theoretical and practical guide to using the workbook ‘Becoming a can-do kid’

By Dr Alan Beggs

©The Human Dimension Ltd 2019 First published in 2019 by The Human Dimension Ltd, Apex House, 185 Well Street, East Malling, Kent. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher. The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no event be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

Contents Chapter Page 1: Setting the scene 2

A new approach 2 The rationale behind the approach 4

2: The theoretical foundations of the workbook 7 Why pupils need grit 8

3: The structure of the workbook 10 Section1: Ready? 11

Exploring the future 11 Turning thoughts into pictures 13 Making an Action Plan 15

Section2: Steady 17 Building confidence 17

Developing resilience 19 Section 3: Go! 23 The Black Box 23 Your Control Room 23 Centring 24 Staying in the Zone 24 Finding your Strawberry 24

A final word 25

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Chapter 1: Setting the scene More than half a million Year 6 pupils undertake the Key Stage 2 SATs tests each year. In truth, for many children the KS2 SATs are a challenge that they feel prepared and ready for. However, a study by home education provider Oxford Home Schooling revealed that 40 per cent of parents with kids aged between five and eleven feel there is too much pressure on their children to perform well. And it’s not just parents. In a survey in 2016, the NUT found that 90% of 6,500 teachers and headteachers agreed that SATs preparation at Key Stage 2 is having a ‘harmful impact on children’s self-confidence and mental health’. And it’s getting worse. Another survey of 1,200 teachers by the Key, a national school support service, found that in general cases of stress, anxiety and panic attacks had increased in more than three-quarters (78%) of primary schools over the past two years. In addition, school leaders reported an increase in fear of academic failure (76%) and depression (55%) among their pupils in the period since 2014. The good news is that schools are increasingly recognising that pupils’ mental health and well-being are vitally important and are putting in place interventions such as mindfulness and meditation, aimed at helping children acquire some of the psychological skills they need to help manage their levels of anxiety and stress. This workbook takes a very different approach. A new approach

As a pioneering Olympic Sport Psychologist, it seemed to me that there are lots of simple, yet powerful techniques which have been developed for sports performers which could so easily be used by children who are facing the first truly challenging experience of their young life.

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Primarily, I wanted to help children to feel more inspired, focused, confident and resilient. As well as this, the workbook will equip them with effective planning and real-time firefighting skills and give them the insights and mental skills they need to help them excel throughout their most crucial year – and beyond. Children like the final version of the book and the exercises. Here are some typical comments about the book made by ten- and eleven-year-old children. “The idea of the book is really good, I've never seen anything like it before” “It’s colourful and it gives you hope”. "I like that it gives tips and things to try, rather than just telling me not to worry" “I like the spaces it has for doing the exercises”. “It is written in a simple easy way any 11-year-old can understand”. “The exercises are different to what we normally do, in a good way”. The final design of the book was shaped by feedback from many children who read early draft versions. It soon became clear that it needed to feature plenty of cartoons, and eventually a ‘theme’ emerged. To put it simply, this was because of some feedback from Amelia, a ten-year old, who said “It’s like someone is talking to you face-to-face.” That insight galvanised and inspired the designer, and she gave the cartoons a role to play – they speak directly to the reader and guide him or her towards the next activity. Here’s an example.

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In fact, there are lots of activities which you and your pupils can work through. You don’t have to do all of them. Work with them to help choose the ones which you both feel will work best for him or her. The activities are not difficult to understand, nor do they require you to have a couch or don a white coat! In fact, although they are based on up-to-date psychological theory and practice, they are largely self-explanatory. And later in this manual, you will find useful tips on how to work with your pupils to complete them. The rationale behind the approach Simply put, your pupils need to have a very positive attitude towards the challenge he or she is facing. This is captured very well by the concept of having a can-do mindset. Easily said – but what exactly contributes to a can-do mindset? The answer is surprisingly simple.

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WHY they are doing what they are doing? All of us need a reason to put ourselves out. For some lucky adults, this is called a vocation, a calling. It’s what inspires them to go the extra mile, to achieve great things. Sadly, in the world of work, many people simply do not have a sense of meaning and purpose like this. They grudgingly turn up each day, do what needs to be done, and take the money at the end of the week; in current parlance, they are ‘disengaged’. The truth is that everyone needs a vision to help make sense of what they are doing, and thus be fully engaged in their own endeavours. The very last thing you need is a pupil who is disengaged from the process of passing the SATs exam. In sport, the vision which inspires and engages someone to deliver their very best is called a Dream Goal. For a top-flight athlete, it may well be competing in the next Olympics. That’s pretty stark, pretty ambitious. In an exactly analogous way, the clearer and more aspirational the dream of a secondary school place is for your pupils, the better. In the workbook, the very first exercise – which you have already encountered - is a way to bring all this to life, in a visual way. Your pupils will create their own vision, in their terms, of where they are aiming to be in a year or so’s time. It will be the beacon which will guide them on the journey they are undertaking. WHO they need to be to achieve their dream You have only to watch a big sporting event to spot the team or the players who are winners. And they know they are winners, too. They know that when the chips are down, they will be ready and able to deliver what they have trained for. They know this because they know they have the mental tools to stay positive, to keep going, to bounce back; to feel confident, to stay focused on what they must do to succeed.

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Of course, whether they win or not rather depends on their opponent on the day, but they don’t have a shred of doubt in their own heads that they are deserving champions. They know they’ve got what it takes. They have a ‘can-do’ mindset. When you put the How and the Who together – that’s where performance comes from, because together they tell your pupils that they are a ‘can-do’ person. This is someone who knows not only that they have the skills and knowledge they need, but that they can mentally cope with whatever is thrown at them.

There is no doubt that can-do people are life’s winners. And in this first major challenge for your pupils, a sense of can-do is exactly what they need to have if they are to succeed.

Knowing you have got what it takes

Knowing how to do it

Can - do mindset

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Chapter 2: The theoretical foundations of the workbook When you think about a psychologist, you may very well conjure up an image of what is known in the trade as ‘talking therapy’, a person lying on a couch being listened to by a seated psychologist. Over a hundred years ago, the very first psychologists, like Sigmund Freud, certainly did this; they wanted to help troubled people and found that listening to them talking about their problems often seemed to work. In fact, this is exactly what present-day counsellors do. The notion that psychological issues had their origins in the unconscious mind became the norm and is probably the reason many people imagine psychologists can ‘read minds’. They can’t; and the idea that most psychological problems originate in the unconscious has long been abandoned. Over the course of the 20th Century, two seismic changes in the way psychologists understand the reasons why some people are prone to stress, anxiety and so on have taken place. By the mid-1970s, therapeutic techniques had become much more focused on helping people recognise that their issues had a lot more to do with their thoughts and their ‘self-talk’, the voice in the head that we all have; interestingly, for most people, self-talk becomes so automatic it’s almost subconscious. Psychologists found that by helping their clients to become aware of and change their thinking patterns, the problem was very likely to go away. Like all scientists, psychologists love using technical words for everyday things - so thinking patterns became ‘cognitive behaviour’, and helping people change it became known as cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). In fact, CBT has proved to be a very successful technique for helping people with common psychological problems like anxiety and stress. Then, at the very end of the 20th Century, the profession suddenly woke up to the fact that the vast majority of people are perfectly normal, well-

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adjusted and even happy. This caused a revolution which has become known as Positive Psychology. We now understand ordinary people much more clearly, and we know how to help them feel even more confident, develop greater resilience, discover their strengths and live happy productive lives. In fact, the workbook has actually been constructed around the important and relatively recent positive psychology concept of grit. Grit is an attitude about, to paraphrase Tennyson, “seeking, striving, finding, and never yielding”. So the idea is not new! In fact, under a different name - tenacity - it was discussed by Aristotle… Interest in the concept of grit was spearheaded by psychologist Angela Duckworth just over a dozen years ago to describe the characteristics of really successful individuals. In simple terms, her idea was that grit involves maintaining goal focused effort for extended periods of time, often while facing adversity. Grit therefore has two components – passion and perseverance. ‘Passion’ for a goal certainly appears to help an individual to sustain effort over the long term. Gritty individuals consciously set long-term challenging goals and in addition do not waver from these goals, regardless of the presence of difficulties along the way. Why your pupils need grit In seeking to appreciate the crucial role grit plays in success, Duckworth and others found that even if children are smart, talented, kind, curious, and come from stable, loving homes they generally don’t succeed in life unless they also know how to work hard, remain committed to their goals, and persevere through struggles and failure. Unsurprisingly, success in education seems not to be just a question of intelligence. In fact, these early researchers concluded that grit is actually a better predictor of success than IQ, based on their evaluation of a wide range of educational attainments by adults and children, including Ivy

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League undergraduates, cadets at West Point US Military Academy, and children’s ranking in the National Spelling Bee. More detailed research has since shown that the picture is perhaps not quite as clear-cut as these early results would suggest. For example, a recent analysis of research on grit on eighty-eight independent samples and over 66,000 individuals found that grit is indeed moderately correlated with academic performance, and that only one component of grit, perseverance of effort explains a lot of the variance in the results. However, they also found that passion for an educational goal also played an important part. Notwithstanding this later work, we really do need to recognise the crucial contribution that grit can make to children’s success in the first real challenge they face in their young lives. The good news is that something can be done about helping children become more gritty. Unlike some personality traits, grit is not something you are born with. But as they grow older, children can be helped to identify their passion and understand that practice, hard work and perseverance are surest way to achievement; they can learn to become gritty. And that is exactly what the workbook aims to do – with your help. As Duckworth stresses, one of the characteristics of “gritty” people is that they are “especially motivated to seek happiness through focused engagement and a sense of meaning or purpose.” And becoming really motivated about the next step in their scholastic career is what the first exercise in the book is all about. Later parts of the book address the wide range of mental skills which are characteristic of resilience.

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Chapter 3 The structure of the workbook The workbook your pupils will use has three main parts. These are best thought of as occurring in chronological order. The first considers the work that needs to be done early on, the ‘getting ready’ phase. In the second part, the focus turns to the efforts that needs to be put in to build resilience and confidence, so that your pupils can keep going in spite of all the pressures until the Big Day. And finally, there is a ‘firefighting’ part, offering lots of ways to help make sure that nothing untoward happens when the chips are down, and the performance of their life has to be pulled out of the hat. So, let’s take a look at the three sections – ready? steady and go!

Human beings thrive when they have a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. Your pupils need this, just as Olympic athletes need a dream goal of making it to the next Olympic Games – or the one after that, perhaps. This vision of the future is what injects passion and commitment into their lives, and yours too, probably. This first exercise is perhaps the most important one in the workbook. It is designed to help your pupils become passionate about their move to a

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Secondary school. In elite sport, this is called a Dream Goal; in the real world, it is often called a Vision Board. To create a vision that’s exciting and compelling, you’ve got to give your pupils the freedom to dream—to use their imagination to see and feel what does not yet exist. Crucially, a vision is not the same as goals or objectives; those come from the head. A vision comes from the heart, so as you work with your pupils to create their dream goal, you need to help them focus on how they want to feel, as well as identifying the things they want. It probably is best therefore to think of this exercise as a two-stage process. First, you can help your pupils become much more aware of the things which are important to them, the things to which they aspire, and the things they hope for in the move to the exciting Big School. They will write these down in the appropriate space in the workbook. Words are important – but they are not visual. This will be the outcome of the second step in this process. Exploring the future The following questions are designed to help your child ‘look within’ to understand themselves and explore what they want in their future. It is important to recognise that this future is not a completely blank canvas; rather it is an extension and deepening of their current reality. You can either work through the list of questions below together with your pupils or let your them do it by themselves. Older children often like to take more control and have some moments of privacy to work alone. However, it’s often a balance of knowing how much guidance to provide and how much to step in without taking over. Only you can judge this, knowing your pupils as you do. And don’t be afraid of pausing if your pupils need a break or loses enthusiasm. The most important thing is to ensure that the activity is done

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at a comfortable pace. Remember that finding your dream goal is a soul-searching and deep-thinking process, and this can take time. One of the best ways to approach this is simply to ask questions which will get your pupils thinking about what they would like to see in their future. What follows are some examples of questions which are known to work. What are your favourite activities or hobbies? This question is designed to ease your pupils into the subjective nature of the process and break the ice for deeper discussions. What parts of being at school do you enjoy the most now? This question helps children to think about and analyse what they like about their current school life. In an ideal world, they will want to encounter more of the same at their secondary school. What makes you happy? This is an open-ended question so that it allows a child to answer in any way they wish. Like anyone else, your pupils will want to be happy in their new life. Later they can visually represent this happiness in any way that makes sense to them. What kind of school would you like to go to? Although ultimately, some children may not get to the school that they want to go to, it is still important to be clear what their dream looks like. This question is about the characteristics of the school – not the name! What kind of school experience would you like to have? Although your pupils won’t have complete control over what happens at school, they do have a lot more control over the way they react and experience it. You could offer helpful suggestions to them on how they might achieve their desired experience. What a topic or subjects would you most like to study at the Big School? This is a good question to help you find out what kind of subjects or topics that your pupils might be passionate about, some of which may be new to them What do you like in your best friend(s)? If you could choose, what kind of friends do you want to have at the Big School?

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Friends play a huge role in a child’s life. Thinking about the kind of friends they would like to have will also help in reducing the choice of bad friendships that could make them unhappy or distract them from their goals. What kind of sports would you like to be able to do at the Big School? Many secondary schools offer sports like rugby or cross-country running which are not available to younger children in Primary education What would you like to do in the Big School that you haven’t done yet? This is a general question to help your pupils face their fears and limitations and identify experiences that they would like to have in the future. And remember there are no right or wrong answers. Just honest ones. If a question is not applicable, just skip it or adjust it to suit your pupils’ particular situation. Turning thoughts into pictures Visualization is one of the most powerful mind exercises you can do. Currently, a rather esoteric belief is going the rounds which asserts that the ‘law of attraction’ happens when you are visualizing. This theory says that when you visualise something you want, you are emitting a powerful frequency out into the Universe, and it will deliver the vision to you. Whether you believe that or not, we do know for certain that visualization works, and scientists increasingly understand why. Actually, visualisation has been around for a long time. Our cavemen ancestors used it to help ensure a successful hunting session. Paintings of speared wildebeest were placed near cave exits to be the last thing hunters saw before venturing outside in a quest for food. And these days, almost all elite athletes have a dream goal which they can see in technicolour; they can identify the moment they achieve it and they can imagine what it will feel like when do.

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As well as helping them to remain focused and motivated, having a clear dream goal also helps them to stay on track over the months and years until they reach it. For them, it’s not just a dream – it’s the very foundation of an action plan which will deliver success. In a similar way, many thoughtful people these days create what is called a vision board to capture whatever future they are working towards. This is simply a collection of images and words that represent the things they want in life–the things they want to do, the things they want to learn, the things they want to be. For children, a vision board can help them stay focused and motivated to achieve realistic goals for their future. Displaying it somewhere that they can see it daily will act as an excellent way to help them stay focused on why they are doing the things they do every day and the future pride and happiness that will come as a result of all that hard work.

Your pupils should choose or draw pictures which represent or symbolise the experiences, feelings and possessions that they want to experience in their new life. They should have fun with this process, using photographs, magazine cut-outs, pictures from the internet or that they draw for themselves. The rule is that these images should inspire them and make them feel good. They could even use a happy picture of themselves! In many cases, a combination of words and pictures can work well, as long as the words that are used can be read at a glance. These should be affirmations, inspirational words, quotations and thoughts. Clearly, this exercise could be undertaken as ‘homework’ if you so choose. But do make sure you see the final result so that you can comment on it. The final result of this process can be posted on their bedroom wall to make sure their vision thrives – simply by seeing it every morning. Your pupils should now have the first component of grit firmly embedded.

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Making an Action Plan To perform at their optimum, athletes need to be super-fit, and be really competent technically. But as well as training for this in a very organised way they also make sure they get enough sleep, they eat a good diet, they are well-organised, they keep their life in balance, and so on. If they neglect any of these additional vital elements, mere fitness and technical competence on the day will not be enough. Their whole life is designed around the goal of winning a medal. The equivalent of fitness training in sport are the skills and knowledge your pupils get from school, from you, from practice papers and books. But SATs pupils are not Olympic athletes. They have a much more varied and interesting life! There are social media to attend to; there are TV programmes to watch; there are friends to see and games to be played. Somehow you and your pupils are going to have to work out how to balance up all these competing claims on their time so as to ensure they keep a healthy perspective on the job they have to do. Making an Action Plan will help them to do this. The exercises to help generate an Action Plan is built around the insights of two seminal thinkers. The first is Stephen Covey. His book, ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’, first published in 1989, has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. It is quite wide-ranging in scope, but several of his principles are really helpful. For example, • Don’t work yourself to death. Strive for a sustainable lifestyle that

affords you time to recuperate, recharge and be effective in the long-term.

• Don’t spend your life working aimlessly, tackling whatever job is at hand. Have a vision for the future and align your actions accordingly to make it into a reality.

• Focus on what’s important, meaning the things that bring you closer to your vision of the future. Don’t get distracted by urgent but unimportant tasks.

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The third point, rather surprisingly, was first mentioned by the former US President Dwight Eisenhower, probably in relation to his role as Commander-in-chief in Europe during WW2. The "Eisenhower Decision Method" evaluates tasks using the criteria important/unimportant and urgent/not urgent and are then placed in what has become known as an Eisenhower Matrix. Of course, SATs is not a World War – but the principle of organising competing demands remains appropriate. You and your pupils are going to have to work out how to balance up all the competing claims on their time so as to ensure they use it wisely. Finally, this section follows another principle of goal-setting which research tells us is really important. Writing down goals makes them real, tangible and memorable. And vitally, the form in which your pupils write down their goals has a real impact on building their confidence and commitment.

Not

urg

ent

U

rgen

t

Not Important Important

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They should include the word ‘will’ in their goal statements. It is not difficult to understand why. Imagine they used the words ‘would like to’ or ‘might’ instead. The word ‘will’ gives the goal statement power, while the others lack passion and gives them an excuse if they get side-tracked.

In this part of the workbook, your pupils will discover some ways to build some important life skills which will help them feel confident and resilient. Building confidence Most of us spend a lot of time focusing on, thinking about and worrying about our weaknesses. There is probably a good reason for this. Overconfidence was a great way to remove yourself from the gene pool in the days when physical dangers abounded. Luckily, all of us had ancestors who worried about not being able to outrun sabre-toothed tigers and the like, and so survived long enough to raise us, and others just like us. We all therefore have an inbuilt tendency to look on the black side, just because pessimism about our abilities once ensured the survival of our species. But that was then, and this is now. Dwelling on one’s weaknesses is counterproductive, especially where SATs is concerned. So why don’t we do the exact opposite?

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Well – in this country we are not good at that. We abhor people who ‘brag’, who are ‘arrogant’, who are ‘too big for their boots’. There are many deep-seated reasons why they do this, of course; these reasons need not concern us, nor do we need to copy their behaviour. Instead we just need to help children feel strong. We need to help them focus on their strengths. Being aware of your strengths are one of the most powerful sources of self-confidence. But I bet you cannot easily trot out your top six! You would be in a minority of around one if you could. The truth is that almost all of us let them sink right off our radar. In the workbook your pupils will find a way to bring them back into awareness, where they need to be. This is a technique invented by a clever and kindly old gentleman over seventy years ago. His name was Bernard Haldane, and he helped countless American GI’s rediscover who they really were after the trauma of years of brutal fighting away from home all around the world. Knowing just how awesome you really are is important when facing a big challenge like the SATs exam. The exercise to help your pupils discover their strengths can probably best be accomplished simply by dialogue. The outcome is yet another thing to go on the bedroom wall. And that’s not the only thing that will end up on the wall…. Confidence is also built from feeling that you are successful in what you do. Keeping a record of successes is a really effective way to do this. So I have also suggested that you can use the detailed Action Plan as the basis of a method to build up a sense that steady progress is being made. By writing out the individual steps, and then crossing each one off as they complete it, your pupils will realize that they are making progress towards their ultimate goal. This is especially important if the goal is big and demanding, or long-term, as this one is.

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By underpinning a sense that steady, positive progress is being made, an even better method is to draw a simple graph of cumulative successful steps towards the end goal; this can be very motivating. A record of this progress could also be something that is pinned on the wall. Developing resilience The second part of grit is what is known as resilience. These days, resilience is spoken about in lots of contexts – work, marriage, health - to name but a few. And typically, academics are fighting over the definition. So what exactly do they think it is? Currently, there are two main ways that resilience is thought of. Either it is about an ability to bounce back when something untoward happens – or it’s an ability to keep going even when the going gets tough. The good news is that while there are nuances of difference in the academic definitions of resilience, it’s generally agreed that resilience has several different strands, which like an intertwined rope, contribute to the capacity of an individual to take the strain. In each of these strands there are a number of personal strengths. There seem to be four main strands to resilience.

• The first strand concerns thinking strengths – things like being solution-focused, adaptable, and flexible have been mentioned.

• The second one is about emotional strengths – like an ability to stay positive, and manage stress.

• Thirdly, some social strengths – such as an ability to ask for help and support, and maintain good relationships with other people – seem to be important.

• Finally, some character strengths, including persistence, being purposeful, and motivated towards a clear goal also seem to be involved.

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Now if you look at this list of strengths, it’s pretty obvious that together they describe someone who is probably going to be able to deal with setbacks and keep going when the going gets tough. In other words – someone who is resilient. In the first exercises in the workbook, your pupils will have encountered ways to cultivate purposefulness and motivation. In this second part of the workbook, he or she can explore with you even more ways of developing the additional strengths they need to ensure their ‘resilience rope’ has no flaws. Much of this involves using some quite specific mental skills, and it will be down to them to master them. But be warned, like learning any other skill, this will take a certain amount of time and practice. They may have to get their thinking straight, and you are going to help them do it. Luckily, the way to do this is very straightforward. Donald Meichenbaum is a psychologist noted for his contributions to cognitive behaviour therapy. Back in 1977, he developed a therapeutic technique called cognitive behaviour modification (i.e. changing the way you think), which focuses on helping people identify and modify dysfunctional self-talk. His approach continues to be a powerful and effective tool for therapists today. In fact, Meichenbaum was voted one of the top 10 influential psychotherapists of the 20th century. Cognitive behavioural modification follows a three-step procedure. This is exactly how you will do it with your pupils – if they need it. Build awareness The first phase involves pupils listening closely to their internal dialogue or self-talk. They want to be especially aware of any negative self-statements that are actually contributing to their anxiety. For example, do they tell themselves negative messages, such as "I'm not smart enough," "This is just too hard for me," or "I can’t do arithmetic”?

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To help them become more aware of their negative self-statements, it is really beneficial for them to write them down. Start using some new self-talk Once a pupil recognizes their negative self-talk, they can begin to change it. As they catch themselves in familiar negative thought patterns, they need to create a new and positive internal dialogue. “I can’t” becomes “It may be difficult, but I can”. Instead of the negative statements, these positive and empowering statements should be written these down in their place. The trick now is for them to practice saying them until they start to believe them – so it’s not a ‘quick fix’. Groove in the new habit Each time a pupil is able to identify and restructure their negative thoughts they are actually learning new skills. That is why they need to be really aware of their previously subconscious thoughts, so that they can deliberately practice and become skilled in thinking positively. And just like any other skill, learning it until it becomes automatic takes time and practice. Finally, there is one further thing you can do to help which may turn out to be very valuable in building resilience. That is to find slightly older children to act as a ‘buddy’ for your pupils. By far the most important impact of buddying is the development of some crucial social skills, such as feeling comfortable in asking for help and support and knowing how to do it effectively. These skills form an important component of resilience. In a so-called buddy system, two people or ‘buddies’ monitor, support and help each other. In the Armed Forces, this is a long-established technique, and the military terms like "Wingman" and "Shipmates” have slipped into common parlance. However, not just the names but also the practice itself that has become commonplace. When learning to swim children almost always have a ‘swim buddy’ to keep an eye on what’s happening to their buddy in the pool.

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As you probably know, this approach has been employed to help children make the transition to secondary education. Commonly, a Year 7 class will be allocated two Year 11 pupils who visit the class once or twice every week. The younger pupils know that they are there to help them with any problems that they have or if they just want someone to talk to. All in all, finding a buddy for your pupils will almost certainly be really beneficial. The ideal buddy would probably be a Year 7/8 secondary school pupil who has some inkling about what life is like after they have moved on to secondary education. Ideally, they would need to commit to meeting with your pupils on a fairly regular basis, although in this age of smartphones, children’s communications are very different from our own!

There is no doubt that ‘exam nerves’ can hit everyone. I have seen undergraduate students running out of an examination in tears, so your child had best be prepared to deal with the emotional impact of sitting an exam. Luckily, there are quite a few really good techniques which have been developed by sport and positive psychologists to help worrying, anxious performers when they are about to Face a big challenge like the SATs exam.

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The best current advice is that you should simply distract yourself from any worrying thoughts. For example, Positive Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky says "Over-thinking involves focusing on a train of thought that goes around and around. You can stop that train of thought by focusing on something else." A number of recent initiatives have tried introducing mindfulness training in schools. This currently rather trendy technique builds on this notion. It can help you break free of your worries by helping you stay ‘in the moment’. It has a lot in common with meditation, which has been around for centuries, of course. When you ‘do’ mindfulness, you simply focus on the way your body feels, the rhythm of your breathing, and let your emotions and the thoughts simply drift across your mind. And with a bit of luck, what happens is that the worrying thoughts soon fade away. But there is more that can be done.

Many of the exercises in this section of the workbook are based on attention-based techniques which you and your pupils can easily develop together. These are drawn from a wide range of sources and are easy to understand. For example • The Black Box addresses the problem of a distracting, worrying

thought. This is a preparatory technique, which seeks to isolate a worrying thought ahead of time so that it has less chance of intruding when it is least wanted.

• Your Control Room is about helping your child feel in control of the

situation. It can be pretty scary to sit an exam under exam conditions, and the danger is that this strange environment overwhelms them, and their ability to focus and deliver the results you both want is compromised. A visualisation technique which aims to make them feel as if all is under control can work well. And it’s fun to do!

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• Centring is a way to maintain their confidence under pressure. It’s not exactly new – it is actually over a thousand years old - but it still works very well.

And finally, an ability to deal with negative feelings should they start to build up will be important. Staying in the Zone and Finding your Strawberry are a couple of useful techniques they can learn to use, so they have them in their arsenal should they need them. Actually – some of these psychological tools are very useful for adults too. From personal experience I can recommend using a couple of these yourself – they can be very effective in calming you down! Two that I have used include the Strawberry, very useful when stuck in traffic and late for an appointment, or in the dentist’s chair having root canal treatment. And the mood words that keep you in the zone certainly worked for me. Once when being interviewed on the radio, I wrote ‘Informed’ and ‘Articulate’ on a piece of paper propped against the microphone. Boy was I impressive! After you have read the tips and helped your pupils do the exercises that seem appropriate, do make sure they do them again and again until they are second nature. This is about growing great mental habits, and that only happens with lots of repetition. And the sooner they can get started the better, it is no use picking up the workbook a week before the examination and expecting results. You have been warned!

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A final word Helping your pupils to complete the exercises in the workbook will lay down the psychological building blocks that create a ‘can do’ mindset. Of course, right now you will both be focused on the SATs exam, but this is just the first of many challenges your pupils will face in their lives. There are more critical exams coming up; then there will be work-related hurdles to face, not to mention whatever else life throws at them. Helping to lay the foundations of the mental attitude and skills they can use later in life may be the most important legacy you can leave with your pupils. The workbook is available at Amazon.co.uk. If you wish to look at it in detail, please contact us and we will arrange for a copy to be sent to you at a considerable discount.

About the author After a long and distinguished research career at the University of Nottingham, with over fifty academic publications to his name, Alan spent fifteen years working as one of the first sport psychologists in the UK. As well as working closely with medal-winning Olympic and Paralympic performers, he was a psychological advisor to the British Olympic Association, and had a part to play in 25% of the medals which Britain took home from the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. He is convinced that it is the possession of a robust sense of one’s positive personal qualities and strengths which underpins performance at the highest level, whatever the role and whatever the challenge. Since 1999, he has been a Founding Director of The Human Dimension Ltd, where he has developed and delivered cutting-edge processes to help people build and sustain a self-assured, can-do mindset. In this role he has worked with people dealing with very diverse personal challenges such as stress, unemployment, long-term disability and examinations, through operational leadership and teamworking to coaching support for senior people in organisations which are undergoing major change. And after the 2012 Olympics in London, a charity called 21st Century Legacy was set up to help school children all across Britain to be the best they can be by becoming more confident and self-responsible. To date, over 200,000 children have taken part in this endeavour. Alan had an important part to play in the development of their programme which is delivered in primary schools.