Back to school for teenagers: what actually helps this term

Hey, this is a guest post from Jonathan Ellis, Chief Product Officer at Cognito. Thanks to the What’s On Hampshire team for having me over. Below are a few tips for parents of teenagers heading back to school. If Cognito ends up being useful for you, you can check it out here. There’s a generous free tier, and What’s On Hampshire readers can get 20% off any paid plan with the code HAMPSHIRE20.

The first few weeks of a new school year always feel bigger than they should. Fresh timetable, new subjects, unfamiliar teachers, a bag that suddenly needs restocking. For teenagers heading into GCSE or A-Level years, there’s the quiet weight of “this one counts” sitting alongside it all. And for parents, there’s the question that never quite goes away: How much do I push, and how much do I let them get on with it?

The short answer is little and often, in ways that feel like normal life. Here’s what tends to help, drawn from years of watching what works.

Little and often beats big pushes

One of the most common mistakes teenagers make with revision is doing nothing for weeks and then trying to cram everything into a marathon session the night before something matters. It doesn’t work well: The brain doesn’t hold information that way. What does work is smaller, more frequent sessions spread over time.

If your teen can do twenty minutes on a subject every couple of days, they’ll retain more than if they do a three-hour block once a fortnight. It’s not about discipline or willpower; it’s how memory works.

Active recall over rereading

If you look at what your teen calls “revising”, it often follows a familiar pattern. Highlighting a page, reading it over, highlighting more, closing the book. It feels productive because they’ve been at their desk for an hour. But research on how memory works keeps landing in the same place: Rereading is one of the least effective things you can do.

What works instead is active recall. That means closing the book and trying to remember what was in it. Writing down what they can remember without looking, testing themselves with flashcards, doing a past paper and marking it, or explaining a concept out loud from memory. It feels harder because it is harder, and that’s the point.

Flashcards are one of the easiest ways in. Your teen can make their own on paper, use a free app like Anki or Quizlet, or use pre-built decks like the ones on Cognito that map to their specific exam board. The tool matters less than the habit of testing rather than reviewing.

The dinner-table trick

One of the most natural ways to help your teen retain what they’ve learned costs nothing and takes about two minutes: Ask them what they covered that day.

Not in a “did you do your homework” way, which lands as an interrogation. More like genuine curiosity. “What was in biology today?” “Anything weird come up in history?” If they explain it back to you, even in three sentences, they’ve done a rep of active recall without noticing.

It also gives you a rough sense of what’s landing and what isn’t, which is more useful than any parents’ evening. If they can’t tell you what they did in maths for three weeks running, that’s information worth having.

Past papers, all year round

Most students only touch a past paper in the last few weeks before exams. That’s too late. Past papers are the single closest thing to the real exam, and doing them throughout the year is the fastest way to spot which topics haven’t stuck.

Your teen doesn’t need to sit a full paper every week. Even doing one section every couple of weeks, marking it honestly against the mark scheme, will do more than another hour of highlighting notes. Teachers and schools usually have plenty of past papers, so it’s worth asking. Exam board websites publish them too. Cognito keeps them all in one place with mark schemes, sorted by topic, which is handy if your teen wants to drill one weak area rather than sit a whole paper. Whichever route works, the useful bit is the same: Try it under time, mark it honestly, work out what to fix.

When mocks arrive, take them seriously

Mocks feel like the practice game, which is exactly why students often under-prepare for them. But mock results are what teachers use to write predicted grades, and predicted grades are what sixth forms and universities use for offers. The knock-on chain is longer than most teenagers realise.

The best thing you can do is help your teen treat mock week the same way they’d treat the real thing. Sleep, breakfast, kit ready the night before, no last-minute panic. Not because mocks are the final word, but because getting the routine right for a lower-stakes run makes the real thing much easier.

If your teen bombs a mock, it isn’t a disaster. It’s the cheapest possible warning that something isn’t sticking. Better to find out in November than in May.

What tends to backfire

A few things worth avoiding:

• Comparing to other kids. “Your friend Zainab is already halfway through her flashcards” is a good way to shut a teenager down.
• Buying more resources than they’ll use. One tool used consistently beats five they’ll open once.
• Rescuing them from every panic. If they leave the PE kit at home, sometimes the right move is to let them handle it. Same for revision they’ve been putting off.

The overall shape is this: Your teenager needs to feel like the person in charge of their own school life, with you as backup. That’s harder than it sounds, and no parent gets it exactly right. Little steady nudges, honest conversation, and knowing when to step back tend to do more than any grand plan.