Speaker 1: So what can you do to support them and what's the best way to combat exam anxiety? Well, Nick and Eva Speakman join us now alongside teacher turned revision coach Richard Riddle. Welcome to you. Now, Richard, you were a secondary school teacher for a long time. You've been teaching children revision techniques for the last nine years. So you know only too well the meltdowns that this time can cause.

Speaker 2: It's an incredibly stressful time as both students and the parents build up to the exam season. What I've noticed in the past is that girls often suffer more from anxiety than boys do. And when I sat on the sofa just a few minutes ago talking to the Speakmans, we touched just on that as well. And in what way? What have you seen, the meltdown? Often it's girls that will tend to over-revise and spend too long just sat behind their desks spending 12 hours or more just trying to revise. And often when you spend that long, you're not being effective. And what about boys? Ah, now this is an interesting one because often boys sometimes need that encouragement to actually start working a little bit harder or being more effective with their time. It's a vicious cycle as well, isn't it?

Speaker 3: It really can be, yes, absolutely. So the more you worry, the less goes in.

Speaker 2: And the same with anything in life, isn't it? The more time you spend doing something. So if you're working seven days a week or studying seven days a week, you're just not really being effective.

Speaker 1: And what about cramming? Because that's something that a lot of people do. You haven't done enough, you suddenly last minute, you sit there, you try and get everything done. Is that effective?

Speaker 2: I think as humans, we all tend to do that. Now you can be effective if you cram. And one of the things we'll talk about later on is how to be the most effective in your exam preparation. And then in the last three or four weeks, how you can be the most effective in that time as well. So it can be useful, but it depends on your personality and how easily you get stressed out. And also how easily your parents get stressed out as well by it.

Speaker 3: Well, you say you've got to learn how to revise.

Speaker 2: So what's the best way to revise? What's the technique? In a nutshell, there are five different ways of learning. Most schools, unfortunately, don't teach this particularly well. It's often because they're themselves not the experts in understanding the process of learning. Now, you can learn in a variety of ways. You can either be a visual, kinesthetic, an oral or a reader. Those are the four main ways of learning. Most people don't even understand that. But once you can understand your preference for learning, and often, luckily, boys have two, maybe three preferences for learning, you can then use that to become a lot more effective. Can you break them down then? What does kinesthetic mean? If you're a kinesthetic, it means you're an active learner. So I'm quite an active person, so I learn by doing. If you're going to teach somebody how to dismantle a car engine, rather than talking to them about it, you actually go and explain, then get them to do it and to learn through doing and through learning through experience.

Speaker 1: And visual, the best way to learn if you're a visual learner?

Speaker 2: So if you're a visual learner, you'll tend to be somebody who likes to draw pictures. So you might like to draw a mind map and have your notes on your wall. And then when you go to sleep at night, you might just see those notes on your wall.

Speaker 1: And it'll go in that way?

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Oral learner?

Speaker 2: Learn by talking. That's the most effective way. So one of the most effective ways of learning is through teaching somebody else. So if you could teach your parents or if you could teach your friends and then get them to teach you, there's no better way of learning than that because it's the pressure that you feel. You want to teach your friends and not look foolish.

Speaker 4: Funnily enough, that's such a great idea because our daughter, she actually used her phone and she spoke her notes into her telephone and then listened back to them. So that was her way of learning.

Speaker 3: Well, it's a good way for a phone because in exams and in revision, a phone can be a nightmare. You can have someone who's a straight-A student that gets into revision time, gets distracted by social media and stuff it all up.

Speaker 4: Yeah, but she actually spoke into her phone and then would put headphones on and use that as her revision to listen back to what she was doing.

Speaker 1: Well, your daughter was the ultimate testee because you've worked with lots of people over your years of helping them with anxiety and sort of revision and things like that. But your daughter put you to the ultimate test because she set herself very, very high goals of going to Oxford. She did.

Speaker 5: She was trying at the age of eight.

Speaker 1: And this was something that at the age of eight, she sowed that seed in her head but with a little bit of help and guidance and obviously a lot of hard work on her part, she got there.

Speaker 4: She did. She got there and she's in her first year at Oxford now doing experimental psychology. But as a parent, when we've helped so many people that have come to us and predominantly parents asking the best way to keep their child calm, but then when we were faced with it, it was never anything. She just set herself such a high goal. And when we had to face it personally, that was just so challenging. So do completely understand what parents go through.

Speaker 5: What are your tips for parents then? Do you know what? I think one of the first things is accepting that because something important is riding at the end of it, you're always going to feel stressed. So it's not just you, it's going to be everybody.

Speaker 4: Yes, I think your child needs to understand that this is quite normal. Whether you're an adult doing a test or a child. However, as a parent, I think it's really important not to implement any sort of grades that you would expect from your child. Just assure them that as long as they're doing their best, then that is adequate. Another thing that we found particularly useful because our daughter would lock herself away was meal times that we insisted that we would sit down and have dinner together so that it brought her away from the revision environment and it gave her time to switch off and we would talk and it gave her the support and certainty that we were there with her. And also, you know, one thing I would say and I'm sure a lot of parents are going to really feel this right now is prepare to bite your lip because there is going to be tears and there's going to be tantrums and there's going to be kind of I can't do this and I'm not going to get there. And you've got to be prepared to bite your lip and just assure them all the time. You know, I am so proud of everything that you're doing and I'm so proud that you're putting the effort in and just to be there for them.