A group of five students resitting maths, three of them also resitting physics, all of whom had failed by margins between small and considerable.
The first thing we did was get their scripts and read them. Three of the five had never been shown what they lost marks on, only the grade, and two of those had entirely wrong beliefs about where their problem was. One boy was convinced he was bad at algebra; he was fine at algebra and was losing almost everything on questions with several steps, because he was abandoning them at the first thing he could not immediately see.
Resit teaching is mostly psychological in the first month. A student who has failed something once has decided something about themselves, and that decision is harder to shift than any topic. We spent four weeks on work they could do, deliberately, before going anywhere difficult.
Four of the five passed maths at the resit, one of them comfortably. The fifth improved and did not pass, and sat it again the following session with us at no charge, which is what we do.
All three passed physics.
The thing we would tell any family in this position: get the script, and read it with somebody who can tell you what it says.
