“They just need more practice.”

It’s something parents of children who struggle with learning hear all the time.

And while practice is an essential part of learning, more practice isn’t necessarily better practice.

For children with learning difficulties in particular, simply repeating an activity may not address the reason they are struggling in the first place.

At Flying Colours, we believe in practice with purpose.

That means knowing exactly what we are practising, why we’re practising it, and how that practice will help a child move forward.

Because effective learning isn’t about how many worksheets a child completes.

It’s about what changes as a result.

Why Do Children Need Practice?

When children first learn something new, it requires considerable conscious effort.

Think about learning to read a new word, recall a number fact or apply a new spelling rule. Initially, the child has to actively think through each step.

With carefully structured practice, skills become increasingly accurate, fluent and automatic.

This matters because our working memory has limited capacity.

When foundational skills become more automatic, they require less conscious effort, leaving more mental capacity available for complex thinking.

A child who can decode words accurately and efficiently, for example, has more cognitive capacity available to think about the meaning of what they’re reading.

A child who can recall basic number facts efficiently has more capacity available for solving a multi-step mathematical problem.

Practice therefore has an important job to do.

But it needs to be the right practice.

What Is Practice with Purpose?

Purposeful practice isn’t simply repeating something over and over.

It is practice deliberately selected to strengthen a particular skill or area of learning.

Before asking a child to practise, we need to understand:

What skill are we trying to strengthen?
Does the child understand the concept first?
Is this the appropriate level of difficulty?
What errors is the child currently making?
How much support do they need?
Is the practice helping the skill become more accurate, fluent or independent?
When should we revisit it?

This turns practice from a generic activity into a targeted part of intervention.

Practice Should Follow Teaching

One of the most important principles at Flying Colours is that we don’t expect children to practise something they haven’t been properly taught.

Practice cannot replace explicit instruction.

If a child doesn’t understand a spelling pattern, giving them a longer spelling list isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem.

If a child doesn’t understand place value, completing another page of calculations may simply reinforce confusion.

If a child is guessing unfamiliar words rather than decoding them, asking them to “read more” doesn’t directly teach the missing decoding skills.

First, we identify the difficulty.

Then we teach the skill explicitly.

Then we provide guided practice.

And only as understanding develops do we gradually expect greater independence.

Why Repetition Alone Can Be a Problem

Repetition has an important role in learning—but repetition without understanding can be ineffective.

A child may complete dozens of questions using an incorrect strategy.

They may memorise an answer without understanding the concept behind it.

Or they may rely heavily on an adult’s prompts without developing independence.

In these situations, the child has certainly been busy.

But being busy isn’t the same as learning.

Purposeful practice gives educators opportunities to observe how a child is responding and make adjustments before misconceptions or ineffective strategies become embedded.

The Science Behind Effective Practice

Research from cognitive science has helped us understand that how practice is structured matters.

Several principles are particularly important.

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Retrieval Practice

Retrieval practice involves actively bringing previously learned information back to mind rather than simply looking at it again.

Each time children successfully retrieve knowledge, the pathway to that information can become stronger and easier to access in the future.

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Spaced Practice

Instead of practising something intensively once and then moving on, effective learning revisits important knowledge over time.

Spacing practice across multiple sessions supports longer-term retention and gives us opportunities to check whether learning has genuinely become secure.

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Cumulative Review

New learning shouldn’t mean old learning disappears.

Purposeful practice regularly incorporates previously taught skills so children continue strengthening them while adding new knowledge.

This is particularly important for children who require more opportunities for consolidation.

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Feedback

Practice is most useful when children receive timely, specific feedback.

Feedback allows errors and misconceptions to be addressed before they become established and helps children understand what successful performance looks like.

Why Purposeful Practice Matters for Children with Learning Difficulties

Children with learning difficulties may require more opportunities than their peers to consolidate and retrieve new knowledge.

But that doesn’t mean simply giving them more work.

In fact, repeatedly asking a child to complete tasks they find difficult can increase frustration and reinforce a sense of failure.

Effective practice needs to consider the child’s:

current skill level
working memory
processing demands
attention
existing knowledge
learning goals
confidence

Sometimes ten carefully selected questions with immediate feedback will provide far more valuable learning than fifty repetitive questions completed incorrectly.

What Practice with Purpose Looks Like at Flying Colours

At Flying Colours, practice is connected to each child’s individual learning goals.

Our educators use assessment, data and ongoing observation to determine which skills require further development.

Practice may be designed to:

strengthen a newly taught skill
develop fluency and automaticity
revisit previous learning
address a specific misconception
apply a skill in a different context
strengthen retrieval from long-term memory
build independence
prepare a child for the next layer of learning

And because we continually monitor how children respond, practice can change as the child progresses.

We’re not simply asking, “Did they finish it?”

We’re asking, “What did they learn from it?”

When Practice Builds Confidence

Purposeful practice also has an emotional benefit.

Children who have experienced repeated difficulty with learning can become understandably reluctant to practise.

Why would you want to repeatedly do something that makes you feel unsuccessful?

When practice is pitched at the right level and children can see themselves improving, the experience begins to change.

They start noticing:

“I remembered that!”

“I didn’t need help this time.”

“That used to be really hard.”

Those moments matter.

Progress becomes visible to the child, and practice stops feeling like punishment for struggling. Instead, it becomes evidence that their effort is leading somewhere.

Practice with Purpose vs Traditional Tutoring

Traditional tutoring can sometimes focus heavily on repetition:

More worksheets.

More revision of whatever is currently being taught in class.

For some children, that may be exactly what they need.

But when a child has an underlying learning difficulty, specialised learning support needs to go further.

We need to understand why the child is struggling before deciding what they should practise.

At Flying Colours, practice sits within a much broader cycle:

Assess. Identify. Teach. Practise. Observe. Review. Adjust.

Every stage informs the next.

That’s the difference between simply doing more work and providing targeted learning support.

How Parents Can Make Practice More Purposeful at Home

Practice at home doesn’t need to mean hours of additional schoolwork.

A few principles can make it much more effective:

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Keep practice short and focused.

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Make sure your child understands before expecting independent practice.

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Revisit skills regularly rather than cramming.

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Encourage your child to retrieve answers before providing them.

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Correct mis- understandings gently and early.

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Focus on accuracy before speed.

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Celebrate improvement and effort rather than the number of questions completed.

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Stop when frustration is preventing productive learning.

Most importantly, remember that children who find learning difficult have already spent a large part of their day working hard.

Effective practice should support learning. Not consume childhood.

The Flying Colours Difference

At Flying Colours, we don’t believe children need worksheets for the sake of worksheets.

Every activity should have a reason.

Every repetition should be building something.

Every learning goal should be informed by what we know about the individual child.

Through explicit instruction, purposeful practice, ongoing assessment and evidence-informed intervention, we help children develop skills that aren’t simply practised today but can be remembered, applied and used independently tomorrow.

Practice Less. Learn More.

Practice is powerful.

But only when it has purpose.

For children with learning difficulties, the answer isn’t necessarily more.

It’s identifying the right skill, teaching it effectively, providing carefully structured opportunities to practise it, and continually checking that learning is becoming secure.

Because the goal isn’t to create children who are good at completing worksheets.

It’s to develop confident, capable and increasingly independent learners.

Looking for More Than Tutoring?

If your child is putting in enormous effort but isn’t making the progress you’d expect, simply adding more practice may not be the answer.

Specialised learning support can help identify what’s getting in the way and provide targeted, evidence-informed instruction and practice designed around your child’s individual needs.

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Practice with Purpose: Why More Practice Isn’t Always Better