By Lara Khneisser | AïeLEAD — Helping young people lead with intention.
You go to parents’ evening hoping to understand how your child is getting on. Then you hear: “They need to try harder.” It is a sentence that closes a conversation rather than opening one, which is why it helps to arrive with a short list of questions to ask at parents’ evening that move the discussion from effort to evidence.
The best questions to ask at parents’ evening start from the work itself. Is your child missing instructions, misreading questions, forgetting information, choosing the wrong calculation or struggling to begin a piece of writing? Each of those is a different problem with a different solution, and none of them is fixed by trying harder.
The short answer
When a teacher says your child needs to try harder, ask for a specific example, identify the part of the task that is difficult, and agree what support to try and how to review it. Effort matters, but the comment alone does not explain why a child is struggling at school.
The five questions to ask at parents’ evening, at a glance
- “Could you show me the errors that keep recurring?” — visual accuracy and word recognition
- “Do they understand at first, but lose information while working?” — memory, attention and sequencing
- “Do they understand the words and how the ideas connect?” — vocabulary and comprehension
- “Is the difficulty remembering facts, choosing a method, or understanding the relationship?” — maths
- “When they struggle to start, is generating an idea the difficult part?” — idea generation and independence
The Structure of Intellect (SOI) model offers a vocabulary for exploring different learning abilities. This can help parents and teachers explore the demands involved in reading, arithmetic, mathematics and creative tasks.
The five areas below turn that perspective into practical questions to ask at parents’ evening. They are possible barriers to investigate, not a diagnosis or a research-ranked list of the five most common causes. A teacher’s comment cannot establish an SOI profile, and learning difficulties can have many causes beyond cognitive abilities.
1. “Could you show me the errors that keep recurring?”
Explore visual accuracy and word recognition
Does “careless work” mean that your child misses small words, confuses similar letters or reads a different word from the one on the page?
Within the SOI framework, visual discrimination concerns noticing differences in letters and words, while visual closure concerns recognising a complete form. Ask about patterns such as confusing similar letters, omitting small words or misreading word beginnings and endings.
These descriptions give you something specific to discuss. They do not establish why an individual child makes those errors.
Ask next: “Does this happen when reading aloud, copying, or answering independently? Is accuracy different when there is more time?”
Agree a next step: Ask the teacher to identify a recurring error pattern in a work sample and explain how it will be taught and checked. If reading accuracy is persistently difficult, discuss the school’s approach to assessing reading and providing appropriate instruction.
The useful shift is from “be more careful” to a clearly identified reading or recording skill.
2. “Do they understand at first, but lose information while working?”
Explore memory, attention and sequencing
If your child cannot follow instructions, ask whether they understood the instruction initially and what they remembered when starting the task.
Useful areas to explore include holding visual or spoken information in mind while processing it, remembering verbal instructions, and retaining details from reading. These are distinct demands: remembering a detail is different from keeping several steps active while completing them.
Independent research supports taking this distinction seriously. The MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit reports that children with low working memory can struggle with classroom activities requiring them to retain information and may be judged inattentive or easily distracted.[1] This does not mean that every distracted child has a working-memory difficulty.
Ask next: “Can they explain the instruction immediately? What changes when the steps are shorter and remain visible?”
Agree a next step: Discuss a short, visible sequence of instructions, checking understanding before independent work, and recording whether fewer steps are missed. Treat the response as useful classroom evidence, rather than proof of a particular cause.
If you have been asking, “Why does my child forget everything?”, bring two specific examples from home. They will help the teacher compare patterns across settings.
3. “Do they understand the words and how the ideas connect?”
Explore vocabulary, sentence meaning and comprehension
Reading words aloud and understanding a passage place different demands on a learner.
The SOI framework distinguishes vocabulary, understanding relationships between ideas, and following extended information. Ask whether your child guesses word meanings, has difficulty connecting ideas, or loses the thread of longer sentences or instructions.
A child who needs reading comprehension help may therefore need a more precise question than “Did you read it properly?”
Ask next: “Which words or sentence structures cause difficulty? Can they explain the question in their own words? Do they understand after unfamiliar vocabulary is explained?”
Agree a next step: Ask which vocabulary or comprehension skill will be taught explicitly, and how the teacher will check that your child can use it independently. The Education Endowment Foundation includes explicit instruction and scaffolding among approaches to supporting pupils with SEND.[2]
For children learning English as an additional language, ask how familiarity with the language of instruction has been considered. Difficulty with unfamiliar vocabulary should not, by itself, be interpreted as a cognitive weakness.
4. “In maths, is the difficulty remembering facts, choosing a method, or understanding the relationship?”
Explore arithmetic knowledge and mathematical reasoning
“Needs more practice” becomes more useful when everyone knows what needs practising.
The SOI framework separates several mathematical demands: understanding numerical patterns, selecting a numerical process, applying facts, understanding abstract relationships, spatial relationships and mathematical vocabulary.
These distinctions matter when deciding what to teach next. Recalling a multiplication fact and deciding which operation a word problem requires are different tasks.
Ask next: “Can you show me where the solution breaks down? Can they calculate once the operation is supplied, or is carrying out the calculation also difficult?”
Agree a next step: Ask the teacher to name the specific skill and model the relevant step, then check a similar problem completed independently. Where language is the barrier, discuss the mathematical words that need teaching.
This gives home practice a clear purpose and makes progress easier to recognise.
5. “When they struggle to start, is generating an idea the difficult part?”
Explore idea generation and independent application
A blank page tells us that work has not begun. It does not tell us why.
The SOI framework includes generating ideas with words, objects and mathematical information. Ask whether the difficulty involves coming up with ideas, beginning without explicit directions, or applying understanding to an unfamiliar task.
These observations invite a question about the demand of an open-ended task. They do not justify deciding that a child lacks imagination or motivation.
Ask next: “Can they explain an idea aloud? What happens after a worked example, a planning prompt or a brief discussion? Can they then continue independently?”
Agree a next step: Discuss a model or planning scaffold and how it will gradually be reduced as independence develops. The EEF describes scaffolding as temporary support that helps pupils access learning.[2]
The aim is to understand which support enables a child to begin and then do more for themselves.
Turn your questions to ask at parents’ evening into a shared plan
You do not need to work through every one of these questions to ask at parents’ evening in a single appointment. Start with the question that best matches the teacher’s example.
A useful opening is:
“I want to help them respond to your feedback. Could we look at one example, identify the difficult step, and agree what we will try?”
Before leaving, record the specific difficulty, the support school will provide, one manageable action at home, and a review date. Agree what improvement would look like: fewer missed instructions, more accurate reading, a correctly chosen operation, or starting writing with less prompting.
Ask your child what felt difficult, too. If difficulties persist, discuss them with the school’s SENCO. Consider the wider picture, including teaching, language, wellbeing and sensory access; cognitive abilities are only one part of understanding a child’s experience.
Parents’ evening questions: your questions answered
How many questions to ask at parents’ evening is reasonable?
Most appointments last five to ten minutes, so one well-chosen question usually achieves more than a list of five rushed ones. Of all the questions to ask at parents’ evening, the useful one is the one that matches the teacher’s own example. Choose the question that matches the teacher’s own example, ask for the work sample, and agree a single next step and a date to review it.
What if the teacher only says my child is “capable but lazy”?
Ask to see the work. “Capable but lazy” is a judgement about motivation; a work sample shows where the task actually broke down. Once you can both point at the same line on the same page, the conversation becomes about a teachable skill rather than a character trait.
Should I ask for an assessment at parents’ evening?
Not necessarily as a first move, and it is rarely the first of the questions to ask at parents’ evening. Start by agreeing a specific support to try and a review date. If the difficulty persists after that, ask the SENCO what the school assesses, how, and when — and what the results would change in day-to-day teaching.
Where AïeLEAD fits
The questions to ask at parents’ evening above are deliberately practical, because that is how AïeLEAD works. Our focus is the learner behind the results. The LEAD pillars—Learn • Experience • Achieve • Develop—frame a conversation about your child’s strengths, difficulties and next steps.
If you are exploring an SOI assessment UK service or cognitive skills training for children, ask what is assessed, what evidence supports the proposed approach, and how progress will be monitored in everyday learning. The SOI framework describes relationships between abilities and learning; those descriptions alone do not establish that a training programme will improve school attainment.
Book a conversation with Lara to discuss your questions and whether AïeLEAD’s approach is appropriate for your child, alongside school support.
Your child deserves feedback they can act on—and you deserve a clear understanding of how to help.
Sources
- MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Understanding how working memory problems impair classroom learning, including its summaries of Alloway et al. (2009) and Gathercole et al. (2008). Used for the relationship between working memory, classroom performance and observed inattention.
- Education Endowment Foundation, Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools and its universal approaches. Used for classroom teaching approaches; these sources do not endorse SOI.