How to Help Your Child Catch Up After Falling Behind in School

The moment you realise your child has genuinely fallen behind, not just had a difficult week, is an unsettling one. There's the guilt that comes with wishing you'd noticed sooner. There's the calculation of how much time is left before exams. And underneath both of those, there's often a helplessness about what, practically, you're supposed to do next.

The first thing worth saying is that falling behind is far more common than most parents realise. In the 2024/25 academic year, around 18% of pupils in England were persistently absent, meaning they missed more than 10% of sessions, a rate still substantially higher than before the pandemic. [1] That's a significant number of children who've had gaps form in their learning through no fault of their own or their parents'. Behind is not a permanent state. It's a starting point.

This guide covers how to get a clear picture of where your child actually is, what you can do at home that genuinely helps, and how to think about whether additional support is worth pursuing.

Before you do anything else: understand what 'behind' actually means

'Behind' covers a lot of ground. A child who has missed a specific unit of work due to illness is behind in a very different way from a child who has been quietly disengaging across several subjects for most of a year. The approach that helps depends almost entirely on which situation you're actually in.

There are broadly three patterns worth distinguishing:

• A specific content gap: a period of absence, a topic that didn't land, a transition that disrupted things. The gap is real but relatively contained, and knowing exactly what it is makes it fixable.
• Cumulative drift: grades that have been sliding gradually over several terms across more than one subject. This is usually a combination of content gaps and a loss of confidence, and it takes longer to address.
• A structural barrier: something underlying is making school genuinely hard, whether that is an unidentified learning difficulty, anxiety, social difficulties, or something else entirely. Content support alone won't close this gap.

Knowing which of these you're dealing with changes what you do. A parent who responds to a structural barrier by adding extra revision sessions is likely to make things harder, not easier. And a parent who responds to a specific, fixable content gap as though it's a crisis will create anxiety where it doesn't need to exist.

A useful starting question: Ask your child what they last felt they understood properly in the subject they're struggling with. Not 'what don't you get', which is too broad and often produces 'everything'. 'What's the last bit that made sense to you?' gives you something specific to work from.

Talk to the school before making a plan

This is the step most parents either skip or delay, usually because they're worried it will feel like a complaint, or because they assume the school already knows and is handling it. In most cases, neither of those things is true.

A brief email to your child's form tutor, framed as a request for a conversation rather than a formal complaint, will typically get you more useful information in twenty minutes than hours of research at home. Ask specifically:

• Which subjects are they most concerned about, and is this a recent change or something that's been developing?
• Do they think the difficulty is with specific content, with confidence, or with something broader?
• What support is already in place, and what does the school recommend at this stage?

Teachers see your child across the whole school day in a way you don't, and they'll often have a more calibrated view of whether a gap is significant or whether it's something that's very likely to close on its own. Getting that view before you act is worth more than most of the time you'd spend acting without it.

If your child is in Year 10 or 11 and you're concerned about GCSE performance specifically, don't wait for parents' evening. A half-term's gap in those years has real consequences, and most teachers would rather hear from a concerned parent in October than find themselves trying to address the same gap in February with much less time available.

What you can actually do at home

Once you have a clearer picture of where the gaps are, there are things you can do at home that make a real difference, and things that feel helpful but often don't.

What works: revisiting the content through retrieval, not re-reading

The instinct when a child has missed or not understood content is to go back through the notes and read them again. This feels productive, and it's not entirely useless, but it's one of the weakest approaches for actually learning and retaining material. Research on learning techniques consistently identifies retrieval practice (closing notes and trying to recall information from memory without looking) as significantly more effective for long-term retention than re-reading or re-watching. [2]

In practice at home, this looks like: your child reads through the content on a topic, closes the book, and tries to write down or say aloud everything they can remember. They check what they missed. They go again a few days later. The discomfort of not remembering things is the learning. It is not a sign the approach isn't working.

Flashcards done properly work the same way. Writing questions on one side and answers on the other, then testing themselves without looking at the answer first. Past paper questions, if your child is in Year 10 or 11, are the closest thing to exam conditions and will tell you more about where the gaps actually are than any amount of note revision.

What works: short, frequent sessions rather than long occasional ones

Memory builds through repeated retrieval over time. Two 30-minute sessions across a week will consolidate learning more effectively than a single 90-minute session, even though the total time is identical. This matters practically for how you help your child structure their time at home. The goal is not a single long session on the weekend but returning to the same material more than once across the week.

For a child who is behind and also anxious about it, shorter sessions have another advantage: they're less daunting. A 25-minute session on one specific topic is something most teenagers can face. An open-ended revision session on 'everything you've missed' is not.

What genuinely helps but isn't about the content: your response to the situation

How you talk about the gap matters more than most parents expect. A child who is already worried about being behind will pick up very quickly on parental anxiety, and anxiety tends to compound rather than motivate. The most useful thing you can do alongside any content support is communicate, clearly and consistently, that being behind is a solvable problem and that you're there to help solve it rather than to be disappointed.

That's not false reassurance — it's accurate. Gaps close. Children catch up. But they do so faster and more willingly when the adults around them treat it as a practical challenge rather than a verdict.

Should you get a tutor?

Tutoring is the most commonly reached-for solution when a child falls behind, and the evidence for it is genuinely positive. The Education Endowment Foundation rates one-to-one tuition as producing up to five months of additional progress, and small group tuition up to four months, making it one of the best-evidenced interventions available. [3] But the evidence also makes clear that tutoring works best when it's targeted at a specific, identified gap and when it's connected to what the child is doing in school rather than running on a separate track alongside it.

A tutor who doesn't know what your child is being taught in class, or who focuses on boosting general confidence rather than addressing specific content gaps, is likely to produce much more modest results than those figures suggest. The question to ask before hiring a tutor isn't 'should we get one?' — it's 'what exactly do we need this person to work on, and how will we know if it's working?'

Cost is a real consideration for many families, and it's worth knowing that tutoring doesn't have to mean expensive one-to-one sessions. Some schools offer free or subsidised catch-up support, particularly for students who are eligible for pupil premium funding. It's always worth asking. Online platforms, group tutoring, and structured adaptive learning tools can also fill specific gaps at considerably lower cost than private tuition. The right choice depends on the nature of the gap and your child's learning style.

On the National Tutoring Programme: The government's National Tutoring Programme, which subsidised school-delivered tutoring for disadvantaged pupils, ended in August 2024. This has left a gap in provision for many schools. If your child's school previously accessed this programme, it's worth asking what alternative support is now in place. Some schools have continued to fund catch-up tutoring from pupil premium budgets.

What to do if the gap feels too large to close before exams

If your child is in Year 11 and the gap is substantial, there will be a temptation to try to cover everything before the exams, along with a feeling that there isn't enough time. Both are understandable, but the second doesn't follow from the first.

Not everything on a GCSE specification carries the same weight in the exam. Most exam papers are weighted towards a smaller set of core concepts and skills, and targeted revision on those areas will do more for a grade than an attempt to cover everything equally. A teacher or tutor who knows the exam specification well can help you identify where the available revision time will have the most impact, which is a more useful question than 'how do we cover everything'.

It's also worth being honest with your child about what realistic progress looks like, without catastrophising. A student who is currently on track for a Grade 3 in maths and puts in consistent, well-directed effort from January to June has a realistic chance of reaching a Grade 5. A student who tries to cover everything in the final three weeks, whatever the approach, will not. The difference between those two paths is starting soon and being systematic, not doing more.

The emotional side of catching up

Children who have fallen behind in school are often dealing with more than a content gap. They're frequently carrying anxiety about the gap itself, some shame about being behind, and a layer of avoidance that makes starting harder than it needs to be. If your child is resistant to any kind of catch-up support, the resistance is usually emotional rather than motivational. The child has concluded, at some level, that effort won't be enough to close the gap, so starting feels like confirming a fear rather than working against it.

The approach that tends to work better than pressure is making the first step genuinely small. One topic. One subject. Twenty minutes. Getting a few things right, and seeing that they got them right, tends to shift the relationship with the gap more than any amount of encouragement from outside. The confidence has to come from doing the thing, not from being told it will be okay.

If resistance is severe — if your child refuses any engagement with schoolwork, is visibly distressed, or is avoiding school itself, the content gap is probably not the most important thing to address first. A conversation with the school's pastoral lead or, if necessary, your GP is worth having before adding more academic pressure.

The short version

Get a clear picture of what the gap actually is before you act. Talk to the school. Focus support on the specific areas that matter most. Use retrieval practice rather than re-reading. Keep sessions short and consistent rather than long and occasional. Address the emotional side alongside the academic side.

None of that is complicated. The hard part is sustaining it, and the thing that makes sustaining it easier is your child seeing that the gap is closing, which tends to happen faster than most parents expect when the approach is well-directed.

BrainStrata is designed to help children work through missed content at their own pace, identifying exactly where the gaps are and building personalised learning pathways around them. If you'd like to find out more, explore our adaptive learning platform.

Sources and further reading

[1] UK Parliament Education Committee (2025). Why are so many children still missing school? Evidence session announcement, July 2025. Persistent absence rate for 2024/25 academic year: 18.4%. Source figure also corroborated by DfE Pupil Attendance in Schools statistics (autumn 2024 / spring 2025). Available at: committees.parliament.uk and explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk

[2] Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. DOI: 10.1177/1529100612453266. Retrieval practice and distributed practice rated as the two highest-utility techniques; re-reading rated low utility.

[3] Education Endowment Foundation (2024). Making a Difference with Effective Tutoring. One-to-one tuition: up to +5 months additional progress. Small group tuition: up to +4 months additional progress. Available at: educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/effective-tutoring