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By Zayna Dar, Founder, Shuhari Tuition
As a parent, it can be confusing and even worrying when your child is putting in a lot of effort but still seems to struggle with schoolwork. You might wonder why their hard work doesn’t seem to be paying off. The reality is that effort and understanding don’t always increase proportionally, and there can be many reasons why your child is still finding certain topics challenging.
Understanding that learning is a process and paying attention to how your child processes information and approaches their learning helps you support them in ways that encourage growth and maintain their confidence.
In this blog, we’ll explore why your child might continue to find schoolwork difficult despite working hard. We’ll look at some of the factors that make learning more challenging and consider how understanding the cause of their difficulties can help you provide the right support.
We’ll also explore how confidence, focus, and secure foundations influence learning, as well as some of the ways teachers can support children who are finding schoolwork difficult in the classroom. By understanding what may be affecting your child’s learning, you can have more productive conversations with their teacher about the support they may need.
Cognitive skills
Sometimes, the difficulty your child is experiencing comes from the cognitive skills that are required of them to complete a particular task. They often have to do a lot more than simply recall information. They need to understand new concepts, make connections between what they already know and what they’re learning, work out which information is relevant, and apply their knowledge to unfamiliar questions.
This can be challenging even when a child is paying attention and making an effort. They might understand a method when their teacher demonstrates it but struggle when they’re asked to use it independently. For example, they might understand a grammar rule in French but find it difficult to apply it to their own writing.
These situations are frustrating for children because they may think they’ve done everything they were supposed to do. They listened to the teacher’s explanation and followed along, but they can’t seem to apply the skills independently or answer a practice question on their own. This leaves them wondering why they’re struggling when everything seemed to make sense when their teacher went through it.
Cognitive skills play a role here. Skills such as reasoning, problem-solving, memory, and making connections develop throughout childhood. They become increasingly important as schoolwork becomes harder. A child may therefore find a task difficult because it requires them to use several cognitive skills at once.
For example, a child might know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but struggle with a word problem because first they need to work out what the question is actually asking them to do. They have to pick out the important information, decide which operation they need, and only then carry out the calculation. If they find it difficult to identify which information is relevant or choose the right operation, they may get the answer wrong even though they know how to perform the calculation itself.
Helping children become aware of how they’re approaching the task makes the problem easier to solve. Asking questions such as ‘How did you work that out?’ or ‘What made you choose that method?’ encourages them to explain their reasoning. This reveals which part of the process they understand and where they may need further guidance.
This is closely connected to metacognition, which is the process of reflecting on our own learning. Encouraging children to think about how they came to an answer and whether their answer makes sense helps them become more aware of their own learning process. You can find out more about this in our blog on metacognition.
Developing these skills takes practice, and children won’t necessarily develop them at the same pace. With appropriate guidance and opportunities to practise, your child’s cognitive function will develop and in time it’ll become easier for them to combine different cognitive skills simultaneously.
For parents, recognising this provides a useful perspective when your child appears to be working hard without making the progress you expected. Their effort may be considerable, but the range of cognitive skills involved in completing the work is still substantial. Understanding this helps you identify where your child needs support and it gives them opportunities to strengthen the skills that underpin their learning.
Mental energy and focus
Another reason your child might be finding schoolwork difficult despite working hard is the amount of mental energy required to concentrate and process information. Learning requires sustained concentration, and children can only maintain a high level of concentration for so long before their mental energy begins to decrease.
Your child spends much of their school day listening to explanations, following instructions, completing tasks, and switching between different subjects. They’re constantly taking in information and deciding how to use it. When a lesson introduces a new or difficult concept, this requires a considerable amount of concentration. As the task becomes more demanding, they may forget a method or need to read a question several times before they can working out what it’s asking.
The amount of information your child needs to hold in their mind also affects how manageable a task is. For example, a question might require them to remember a method they’ve just learnt while also deciding which information is relevant and figuring out how to apply their knowledge to the question. Working memory allows us to hold information temporarily while we use it, but it has limited capacity. When too much information needs to be processed at once, the task becomes unmanageable.
As a parent, your oversight of what’s happening in the classroom is limited. This is where talking to your child’s teacher can be useful. Teachers observe how your child responds during lessons and may have more insight into whether they lose focus during explanations, struggle to follow several instructions at once, or find it difficult to work independently, for example.
If this is something your child is experiencing, there are practical strategies that can be used in the classroom to support their attention. For example, their teacher can break instructions down into smaller steps to make them more digestible or keep them visible on the board. They can also double-check whether your child understands what they need to do before beginning a task. A child who becomes distracted during independent work may benefit from having a clear, achievable target to work towards.
As a parent, you can ask your child’s teacher questions to understand exactly when their concentration falters, for example, when they have to watch a long demonstration. These conversations help you build a clearer picture of what’s happening in the classroom. They also help you and your child’s teacher identify which strategies are most appropriate for them. You may then be able to reinforce some of these strategies when your child is doing homework or studying at home.
Confidence and self-belief
Another factor that affects how your child manages schoolwork they find difficult is their confidence in their own ability. If they’re struggling with a subject, they may start to develop negative beliefs about what they’re capable of achieving. This kind of negative self-talk is very common when a child has experienced prolonged difficulty in a subject. They might say things like ‘I’m stupid’, or ‘I’ll never get this right’.
These comments reflect beliefs they’ve started to develop about themselves as learners. Once your child starts to believe that they’re not good at a particular subject, it affects their attitude and approach to learning. They may decide that there’s no point in trying because they already expect to get it wrong. They might give up quickly or avoid asking for help because they don’t want to draw attention to something they’ve convinced themselves they can’t do.
This can turn into a negative cycle where your child expects to struggle, so they put less effort into their work or give up when they get stuck. They then fail to complete the task successfully, which reinforces their belief that they’re not capable. The next time they encounter this topic, their confidence is at an all-time low.
Be mindful of the language you use around your child. If they’re regularly described as ‘not a maths person’, they may internalise the belief that they’ll never be good at the subject. Sometimes, difficulty in one area is generalised to the entire subject and the child starts to develop negative judgements about themselves as a learner more broadly. Teachers can help challenge these beliefs by paying attention to the language used in the classroom.
If a child says, ‘I can’t do this’, teachers can help them reframe this as ‘I can’t do this yet’ and then work with them to identify which part of the task they’re finding difficult so that it can be tackled with support. This gives them something concrete to work on instead of leaving them with the feeling that they simply can’t do it.
It’s important to recognise the progress that your child is making, even when they’re still finding a subject difficult. If they struggled to understand fractions at the start of the year but can now add and subtract fractions with different denominators, this small win is worth pointing out and celebrating.
Securing the foundations
Gaps in your child’s understanding of earlier concepts is another reason they may be working hard but still finding schoolwork tough. New learning is often built on knowledge and skills that children have already been taught, so if an important part of that foundation is missing, the next stage becomes much trickier.
For example, your child might be struggling with long division because they’re still unsure about multiplication facts. They may be able to follow the steps when their teacher works through an example, but become stuck when they have to complete a long division problem on their own. The issue is they’re having to use a skill they haven’t fully secured while learning something new.
Sometimes the gaps aren’t obvious because your child may have managed the topic in class when it was first taught but struggled to remember it several weeks later. It’s also common for children to learn a method without fully understanding why it works. Because maths is often cumulative, a shaky foundation in earlier concepts creates roadblocks when students advance to more complex topics.
For example, if your child is struggling with equivalent fractions, they may know that 1/2 is a fraction, but not recognise that 2/4 and 3/6 are equivalent fractions. This conceptual gap creates a domino effect that makes other related topics, like adding fractions with different denominators, much harder.
If your child is struggling with a topic, it can be useful to step back and find out where that knowledge or skill gap is coming from. Your child’s teacher will have a clearer idea of the curriculum and how each topic builds on one another. They can identify whether they’re struggling with the new concept itself or whether the issue is related to a skill that’s already been covered in class but not understood or retained.
Working independently
The older a child gets, the more they’re expected to complete schoolwork independently without having a teacher to guide them through every step. For some children, this is where they start to struggle because independent work places greater demands on the brain. They may understand the work when someone guides them through it but find it much harder to retrieve and use that knowledge without support.
When they’re working alone, they’re suddenly without a teacher providing prompts and keeping them on track. They have to draw on what they remember from the lesson and work out how to apply it to the question in front of them. If they haven’t fully understood the material, they may struggle to answer the question.
Teachers can support this by gradually reducing the amount of help they give. This is sometimes called fading the scaffold. When a child is first learning something, the teacher might talk them through each step, which means the child doesn’t have to remember the whole process while also trying to solve the problem.
As they become more comfortable with the method, the teacher gives fewer prompts and leaves more of the work to the child. The child then has to retrieve the method from memory and decide how to use it without being told what to do next. With repeated practice, this becomes easier because the knowledge and steps involved are more familiar.
Teachers can make this transition easier by checking that your child has understood the process before reducing their support. For example, after working through an example question with the class, the teacher might give students a similar question and ask them to explain what they would do first. If they can explain the first step and why they’d take it, the teacher has some evidence they’re ready to try it independently.
If the students get stuck, the teacher can provide a small prompt rather than explain the entire process again. This means the students get a chance to retrieve the information themselves while still having help available when they need it.
It’s also worth checking whether students can apply the same skill to a slightly different question. Being able to follow an example doesn’t necessarily mean they can use that knowledge to answer a question in an unfamiliar context. Giving them a question that requires the same underlying skill in a new context can show whether they’ve understood what they’re doing or simply following the steps exactly as they’ve been shown.
What can parents do?
Start by speaking to your child’s teacher and building a clearer picture of precisely what’s happening when they get stuck in class. They may understand an explanation but struggle to apply the information in a different scenario. They may manage a task with support but find it difficult when that support is removed. They may be missing a piece of knowledge covered earlier that’s making new learning harder to stick.
Knowing exactly where the difficulty lies gives you something specific to work on at home if there’s some knowledge your child needs to build or a skill they need more practice with. You can then work alongside their teacher to fill their knowledge or skill gaps. If your child is working hard but continues to struggle, getting to the bottom of why they’re struggling is the first step towards helping them overcome any difficulties they’re facing in the classroom.
