The week before, and the day itself

The final week: stop teaching

Nothing new goes in usefully in the last week, and attempting it tends to unsettle rather than help. The week is for consolidation and calm.

Light review only. Revisit things already known, so the sessions end in success rather than frustration.
One timed paper early in the week at most, and none in the last day or two.
Sleep first. A well-rested child performs better than a tired one who did an extra hour. This is not a platitude; it is the single largest lever left.

Talk about it plainly

Children read adult anxiety extremely well and usually assume they have caused it. If the household treats the assessment as a large and dreadful thing, the child arrives believing that.

Say plainly that they will do their best, that the outcome is one input into where they go next, and that nothing about it changes what you think of them. Then talk about something else.

The night before

Pack whatever is needed and put it by the door, so the morning holds no searching.
An ordinary evening and an ordinary bedtime. Not an early one, which mainly produces lying awake.
No last-minute quizzing, however tempting. Nothing gained is worth the message it sends.

The morning

Breakfast, unhurried timings, and a calm handover. Leave earlier than feels necessary — arriving with time to spare removes a category of stress entirely.

Keep the goodbye brief and confident. A long, emotional send-off raises the stakes at exactly the wrong moment.

During the paper: two things worth rehearsing

These are worth saying out loud beforehand, because in the room a child needs them to be automatic:

A hard question is not a disaster. Skip it, keep moving, come back if there is time. Papers are built to contain questions most children find hard.
Answer everything. A blank scores nothing; a sensible guess might. Rule out what is obviously wrong first.

Both are covered in more depth in our guide to exam technique.

Afterwards

Resist the debrief. Asking what came up and how it went, question by question, only invites a child to catalogue what they think they got wrong — and their impression is usually a poor guide to their actual performance.

Ask if they are alright, tell them you are proud of them for sitting it, and let it go. If there is a second paper on a later date, this matters more still: a child who has spent a fortnight replaying the first one arrives at the second already tired.