Bad in school, too good for counselling

Jason feels like his life is falling apart. He’s just received back his A Level mock exams and it’s clear that he’s not done well. Certainly not well enough to please his parents who expect him to go to that great university that both mum and dad went to, and that his cousin Mia is doing so well at. He tries to block out the results from his mind, telling himself that it’ll be all right in the end – a similar thing happened with GCSEs and he made up for it at the last moment by just revising lots and lots over Easter. Thing is, deep down Jason knows that this may well not happen: yes, he went out a couple of times over Christmas with his friends but the rest of the time he worked pretty hard. He still has the revision timetable he made, hanging multicoloured on his wall. He’s not quite sure what more he could have done, and doesn’t know what to do about it. When his parents try to talk to him about it he withdraws further into his shell and lashes out with a ‘get off my back!’ He knows it’s not fair to them, he knows it’s not their fault and that they’re worried about him and he feels guilty for being the cause of their worries. He’s heard them arguing in the kitchen about the best way forward for him and it just made him feel worse to know that he’s the cause of their arguments. Jason hates it when they argue.

Jason’s mother is worried. This last parents’ evening the feedback from Jason’s A Level mocks was mixed to put it mildly. All his teachers seem to agree that he has the ability, but that somehow he just doesn’t make the grade when it comes to exams. She’s thought about getting him a tutor, but Jason’s problems seem to vary from subject to subject, and she’s loath to take away even more time from him.

Jason is stuck in a limbo: he isn’t doing well in school, certainly not as well as he and his parents would like, and his problems are mounting and seem to be rapidly becoming bigger issues. Then again, he isn’t bad enough to warrant psychological intervention or counselling, and tutoring isn’t appropriate either for his problems are not specific to a subject. Fortunately for him and his parents, that is where an academic coach can help. Academic coaching sits in a middle ground: it is more than the normal pastoral care provided at schools because of its individual and one-to-one nature. On the other hand it is not quite tutoring, because it focuses on the well-being of the whole child, examining where their actions, thoughts and beliefs might be contributing to their problems. These techniques are similar to those used in cognitive behavioural therapy, but academic coaching uses them purely in a practical way to help a child make the most of their academic potential and often brings in techniques from the business world too to help with time management, prioritisation and target-setting.

Jason’s problems, once addressed with academic coaching, resolved themselves quickly. We took a multi-faceted approach examining Jason’s immediate priorities, evaluating his long-term goals and examining some self-defeating beliefs about his ability that he had come to hold. To top it off we taught Jason some time management techniques and some innovative but highly effective revision strategies. Jason became rapidly much happier at the thought of school and understood what actions he needed to take to help himself. This also helped his interactions at home to be less conflictual. Academic coaching can help in situations such as Jason’s: where there is a problem that manifests itself in a child’s school life and that the school seems unable to address, but that is not severe enough to warrant a full-blown psychological intervention. If this sounds like your case, give us a call for a brief initial telephone consultation. Here at YouCan.Education we have many years of experience dealing precisely with cases such as these and look forward to helping many more children achieve their full potential.