Planning, flexibility and impulse control — the mental machinery that lets a developing brain get things done.
Plain English, no jargon. You don't need a teaching background to use this — just read the parts that feel useful and skip the rest. If something raises a question, your child's teacher or SENDCO is the best next step.
Executive function is a family of skills: planning, holding a goal in mind, resisting the first impulse, and shifting between tasks. It's what lets a child think before they act, and finish what they started.
It's the air traffic control of the developing brain.
You call them for dinner. Twenty minutes later, they're still on the same page of the book — not out of defiance, but because getting up and switching tasks costs more than we realise.
Give a two-minute warning before switching activities. Concrete, kind, repeated.
A picture-based morning or bedtime chart offloads planning from their head to the wall.
"Tidy your room" is huge; "put shoes in the box" is doable.
When they act before thinking, help them name what happened afterwards — that's the learning moment.
The professional Evidence Library shows the same ideas written for teachers, SENDCOs and school leaders.
Open the Evidence LibraryA calm handful of next steps — not a checklist. Follow whichever thread is most useful right now.
See the same evidence translated for teachers, so home and school can pull in the same direction.
Sensory, attention, communication, wellbeing — see how this topic sits alongside the wider picture.
Working memory, attention, executive function and cognitive load — threaded into one guided journey.
Each guide below connects to the one you've just read. We've noted why — so you can follow the thread that matters most to you.
Working memory is one of the three core executive functions — planning and self-regulation depend on it.
Sustained and selective attention are the raw materials executive function organises into purposeful action.
Reducing extraneous load frees the mental resources needed for planning, monitoring and self-regulation.
Executive function tasks feel harder when processing is slower — the same demands take more capacity.
How children make sense of what adults say — and what we can change about the way we communicate so that more children understand, participate and show what they know.
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How children put their thoughts, ideas, needs and experiences into words — and what adults can change so that more children can show what they think and know.
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What it means to really know a word, why word knowledge sits underneath so much classroom learning, and how adults can build it deliberately without turning language into a deficit.
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Being hard to understand is not the same as having less to say. What speech sounds are, how clarity develops at different rates, and how to keep a child fully included while it does.
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Planning and self-monitoring depend on how settled a child feels; the two are usually looked at together.
