English anxiety — the belief that you’re “not a words person,” that writing is something other people do well, that analysis is guesswork dressed up as insight — is genuinely common, and it has a significant effect on exam performance. Students who approach English with anxiety write cautiously, avoid creative risks, second-guess their own clear thinking, and underperform relative to their actual ability.
The good news is that confidence in English, unlike aptitude for it, is genuinely within a parent’s power to influence. Here’s how.
Talk About Books, Stories, and Language at Home
Children who grow up in households where language is treated as interesting and worth discussing develop a relationship with words that is fundamentally different from children in households where it’s treated as a school subject. This doesn’t require anything elaborate or time-consuming — it’s as simple as mentioning what you’re reading, asking “did you enjoy that?” about a book, or commenting on a piece of writing you found striking.
The message this sends is subtle but powerful: language is something we value, something we find interesting, something worth attending to. That message shapes how a child approaches an English lesson or an English exam — whether they see it as a test of something they care about, or a test of something alien to their experience.
Praise the Thinking, Not Just the Grade
When your child writes something and shows it to you, or tells you about an idea they had in a lesson, the most confidence-building response is engagement with the idea: “That’s a really interesting reading of the character — what made you think that?” rather than “Is that going to be enough for your essay?” or “What mark did you get?”
Children whose intellectual contributions are taken seriously — whose ideas are engaged with rather than evaluated for correctness — develop the confidence to keep having ideas, to defend them under challenge, and to take the risks that English exams reward. Children whose responses are primarily evaluated for their grade learn to produce safe, forgettable answers that minimise the risk of being wrong.
Let Them Be Wrong Without Catastrophe
One of the most confidence-destroying things in English is the belief that there is one right answer and you either have it or you don’t. This is a misunderstanding of what English at IGCSE and A-Level tests — but it’s a very common one, reinforced whenever students are corrected abruptly or treated as wrong for offering an interpretation.
Good English education teaches students that interpretation requires evidence and argument — that you can’t just say anything, but you can say many different things if you can support them. A student who understands this is far less anxious in an exam: they know that their job is to argue well, not to guess what the examiner thinks.
At home, you can reinforce this by arguing about books and stories with genuine openness: “I thought the ending was sad, but maybe you’re right that it was hopeful — what makes you say that?” Modelling the possibility of different valid readings is one of the most valuable things a parent can do for an English student.
Celebrate Small Progress
English improves slowly and the improvements can feel invisible. A student who was writing comma-spliced sentences six months ago and has now stopped doesn’t feel the difference in the way they feel when they’ve memorised a new equation. But the improvement is real and significant, and making it visible — “your writing is much more confident than it was at the start of the year” — reinforces the belief that effort produces results, which is the foundation of confidence.
If your child’s teacher or tutor provides written feedback, read it occasionally with your child. Not to police or pressure, but to celebrate the specific things they’ve improved on, and to understand what they’re working on. This turns feedback from a verdict into a roadmap — and students who understand their roadmap move along it much faster.
At Thorogood English, building genuine confidence alongside academic skill is central to how we teach. Small groups mean every student feels known — not anonymous — and the culture is one of participation and intellectual curiosity, not performance anxiety. Join the waiting list for January 2027 classes.
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