Cultivating Confidence and Preparing for the SATs — A Recap of Carrie’s Interview on ALL FM Radio

Hi everyone, Carrie here!

Last month, I had the pleasure of joining Babs Bray on ALL FM Radio here in Manchester. This was my first time going live on air… and despite some pre-interview jitters, it was actually so much fun! 

Babs’ show, Our Best Life, explores topics related to mental health and well-being. With exam season right around the corner, this was the perfect opportunity for me to share some of our tried and tested exam prep techniques for boosting confidence. We didn’t just ‘talk shop’ though, we also listened to some fabulous Motown tunes — the perfect midweek pick-me-up!

After our conversation, I felt motivated to recap our conversation because we covered so many useful strategies that you can try at home. Much of our conversation was geared toward parents with children preparing for the SATs, but a lot of the advice is still relevant for students at any age.

So without further ado, here’s a recap of my recent interview with Babs. 

An Interview with Babs Bray on ALL FM Radio

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do.

“So my name is Carrie Burke, and I’m the director of Carrie Burke Tutor Work. As it says on the tin, we provide tuition. And that’s for all age groups – from very young children, right up until some degree-level students that we have with us.” 

“In terms of me, I’m a trained teacher myself. I’ve got a master’s from Glasgow University, and I did my PGCE at Sunderland University. I’m not working in schools anymore – but when I did, I always tutored because I always really loved it. I loved to be able to see the progress that children could make on a one-to-one basis.” 

So I’ve got a few questions here about children and how you tackle a child with confidence issues – because this is quite a big one, isn’t it?

“Nine times out of 10, if a parent is contacting us because they don’t feel their child is where they should be or performing to the best of their ability, nine times out of 10, it is a confidence issue. Something’s happened whereby they have a self-limiting belief that they cannot perform to the best of their ability. So that’s the main challenge that we see, is confidence in those children. I suppose our objective then is to build that confidence up.”

“It could also be that there is an undiagnosed or additional need. Now we can’t diagnose, but we’ve been in the game long enough to be able to identify certain signs of this. It could also be that school is not the right setting for them (see Emotionally Based School Avoidance – EBSA) and they’re just not able to learn in that environment. So we offer an alternative.”

“In other cases, it could be the curriculum is going too quickly for them, and some children just need extra consolidation. And of course, when the curriculum is going too quickly for you, what happens to your confidence then? It comes back to that confidence time and time again.” 

Have you got any tips for parents, grandparents, and carers on how they can build up a bit of confidence in their child?

“Yeah, absolutely! I think the main thing really is to frame everything in the positive and focus on the positive. So you might have a child who’s saying, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it”. Let’s change that to “No, you can’t do it yet.”” 

“Any praise at all, verbal praise, written praise, for the slightest thing, really builds confidence. And it doesn’t have to be with learning either. Children love praise. You can see it in their physiology as well. You just see them blooming. They sit up more straight, the chin goes up, and you can just see the whole change in the facial features. Everything is so good.”

“So I would say it’s so easy for parents and grandparents to say, “Oh, they won’t do it for me.” Or, “I’m finding it tricky with them” and “they haven’t done this. They haven’t done that.” But what have they done? What have they done that you can praise them for and start with that? 

“I also think it’s really, really important to focus on the effort, not the outcome. So it might be that they are not where they should be in terms of maths and English according to the curriculum. But if you focus on the effort that they put in, that is going to be a lot better for them in terms of self-confidence and self-worth and so on. Then it will be them focusing on the outcome. They’ll know that if they keep putting in that effort, then they’ll get there eventually. So if we focus on the effort rather than the outcome, it makes a real, real difference.”

“Sometimes the curriculum goes too quickly for children, and it may be about pitching the learning that’s at the right level for them, rather than the year group that they’re in. So it could be that you’ve got a nine-year-old child who still likes small world play. You might think that’s not learning, but actually it is. It can be really good for vocabulary. And vocabulary helps with learning. Or, reading books that they enjoyed as very small children, it’s still learning. It’s still good for them.”

“Also, take a child-led approach. What’s the child interested in? They might have a specific hobby or topic that they just can’t get enough of. Just go with the flow. See what they enjoy to learn. You never know what’s going to come up on those SATs reading papers, either. So you know, if they’ve got a special interest in dinosaurs, who knows what might come up on the comprehension?”

“I think the main thing is just reasserting to your child that they’ve got all the resources they need, and you’re just there to help them. And saying things like, “We know you can do this. You’re just finding it a bit tricky at the moment, but I can help you along with this.” Listen to what they have to say. They’ll probably tell you how you can help.”

“Other things that work quite well are stickers. I mean, we’ve got year nines who still love a sticker! And they also love certificates.”

So have you got a couple of success stories? I know you’ve got loads of them, but just share a couple with us today.

“I love success stories. So one child, we’ll call him Sean. We started with him in the November of year six, and obviously, that’s a pivotal year. We did an assessment with him, and we asked him, “When was the last time you felt confident doing maths?” And he said, “Year two”. Okay, that’s fine, we knew where to start. So we started at year two, and then that was November. His SATs were in May, and within six months, he’d gone from a year two level to a really good year six level. So I always remember that he put in an awful lot of effort, as did his parents. And I love that. I love the progress that he was able to make.” 

“Another one, we had a girl, Maisie, coming to us. Throughout her whole school career, she’d never once put her hands up in maths to answer a question. So she came in really excited one Saturday, and said “Carrie! Carrie, guess what? I put my hand up in maths today.” I said, “Well, that’s fantastic! I don’t care if you got the answer right or wrong. Look at the confidence that you’ve got to be able to just give it a go.” And from that point again, her learning just went through the roof because of that encouragement, and that confidence to just give it a go.”

“We had another girl, she had to resit maths and then she had to resit it again, but she passed on the third time. And I love that story because she kept going, and she showed tenacity and perseverance. It was really hard, and she was only a couple of marks off passing each time. But she kept going. She didn’t give up. So for me, that’s a real success story, because it wasn’t something that came to her naturally or easily.”

Now let’s go on to SATs because exam season is coming up very soon. Have you got any advice for parents, grandparents, and carers on how we can get our children prepared for SATs?

“The main thing that you can do is read. Reading is so important with your children. The Ofsted lead will always look at literacy above maths. We live in a society where they put maths and sciences on a pedestal. It’s actually literacy that is so important because it underpins all of the other subjects. So reading with your children is really important. And not just hearing them read, but asking them questions. Especially on the SATs, the three most important content domains are inference, retrieval, and vocabulary. Inference is the one that the children often find tricky. It’s the reading in between the lines.”

“It doesn’t always have to be fictional books. Children’s newspapers are good. Anything that will get them exposed to a wide variety of vocabulary. I would also say as well, if a child is reading a book, it’s great if they’re reading for pleasure, but also make sure that they’ve got a dictionary. Quite often, what they’ll do is they’ll assume that they know what the word means, and they will know it in context, but you pull it out of that context, and they’ve got no idea what it means. So having a dictionary is always really good.”

“The other thing that I would say as well is times tables. The times tables are like the ABCs of maths, right? Most of maths is multiplicative. And if you can get your times tables and have that recall of them, that fast recall of them, it will help you in so many ways. It can help you with fractions, decimals, percentages, and algebra. So knowing the times tables and the division tables as well, actually, it’s really important.” 

“I think one of the other things is that we think, well, learning has to be from a book or a workbook, right? That’s great. But also, learning is all around us. I had a child the other day, in Year 4, who picked up a 5p and said, “What’s this?”. Counting money is so good for playing shop. It helps with adding and subtracting their calculations. Learning is all around. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in a workbook or on a worksheet. Monopoly is a brilliant way of playing with money. Scrabble is great for vocabulary. There’s so many different board games out there that we can play, which will help children hone their skills and they don’t even realize they’re learning.” 

“Role play is also really good for inference skills as well. If you can put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, you can understand when you read the words about them.”

“For anybody who is preparing for a test, I would say, have a plan in place. Some students are brilliant at it. Others just need a little bit of a hand, right? So if they don’t plan where they’re going, they won’t know if they’ve got there.”

“In the exam itself, there are certain strategies that they can use. One of them is reading the questions. If you tell your children to read the questions in their head, in a voice that makes them feel comfortable and calm and relaxed, it will really help them. Or, if they can’t think of somebody, pretend they’re reading it to a reception child – because they will automatically pause at the key information.”

“For calming the nerves, there are lots of breathing exercises that we can do there. One of our techniques that we like to call is ‘squeezing lemons’. Pretend you’ve got a lemon in each hand and squeeze it. Not just with your hands, but with every fibre of your being. Then relax. What happens? You start to breathe, and you start to breathe more deeply. When we are stressed, we start taking shallow breaths. But if you squeeze in lemons, then you are able to hold your breath and take a deep breath. It relaxes us.”

“Another big tip is water. Make sure you drink plenty of water. The brain is mostly made up of water. If you’re not drinking water, your brain is going to be dehydrated and it’s not going to work as well, is it?” 

“One last one – if you’re feeling stressed, move. When you move, your mind can change. Your mood can change. And I don’t know if you know this either, but your body doesn’t know the difference between a fake laugh and a real laugh. So if you start laughing fakely, your body will still release those feel-good endorphins that can make you feel a little bit calmer, a little bit more relaxed, and a little bit more energetic and excited.”

We’ve already mentioned that maths, reading, and role play are very important. But what do you think is another thing that’s very important in school? What subject?

“I think PE is really underestimated. It’s such an important subject. It gives those children who may not be very good at maths and English a time to shine, those kinesthetic learners, those hands-on learners. You’ve got the physical aspect of PE, where they’re moving around, they’re getting healthier, they’re getting fitter, which has a positive effect on the psyche. PE also encompasses a lot of the other subjects, like your sciences, social sciences, maths, and it really can underpin quite a lot of those subjects.”

“I was speaking to another tutor about this yesterday, and she said drama. She thinks drama is really important because it gives those children who might not necessarily have a voice in class, a time to shine. And again, the performances and building that self-confidence, being able to perform in front of an audience, public speaking, it lends itself very well to that as well.”

Thank You Babs and ALL FM Radio!

If you’d like to listen to the full episode (Motown hits included), you can find the full recording on MixCloud. You can listen to Babs’ show, Our Best Life, every other Wednesday on ALL FM 96.9. You can also find her on Instagram here. 

If your child needs some extra help with school, you can find all of our available classes and offerings here at Carrie Burke Tutor Work on our website. If you can’t see something which fits in with what you want, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to look at alternatives for you!