Executive function
The set of mental skills that run everything else — planning, starting a task, holding a sequence in mind, switching, resisting the first impulse, monitoring your own work.
Why executive function matters.
This explains the pattern that confuses parents and teachers more than any other: a bright child who cannot begin. Understanding the work and organising yourself to do it are separate abilities, and school assesses the first while quietly requiring the second.
Adjustments here are mostly structural rather than therapeutic. Making the next step visible, breaking a task into named parts, and reducing the number of decisions between a child and starting. Being told to try harder addresses a problem the child does not have.
Questions that get a real answer
- Is my child stuck on understanding, or on starting?
- What makes the next step visible to them?
- How many separate instructions are they being given at once?
Ask these of anyone, including us. What you are listening for is not the right answer — it is whether the answer is specific enough to be wrong.
Terms that usually turn up alongside it.
Exit criterion
The condition that has to be true for a stage of support to end, agreed in writing before that stage starts.
GlossaryExpressive language
What a child can put out — words, sentences, gestures, signs, anything that gets a message across. Distinct
GlossaryFading
Deliberately reducing prompts, adult proximity or session frequency as a child becomes more independent. It
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