It started with the biscuits. A mother noticed that the tin she usually refilled once a week was emptying in two days. Her son, normally happy to talk about his day, had taken to eating in his room with the door shut. She put it down to a teenage phase. Then came the missed football training, the light still on at 2am, the snapped replies over nothing at all. By the time she connected the dots, her son had been quietly wrestling with exam pressure for weeks.
This scenario plays out in homes across the country every spring. The trouble with exam stress is that it rarely announces itself. It hides in small changes that are easy to explain away, which is exactly why so many parents only recognise it once it has taken hold.
Signs of Exam Stress
Stress Wears a Disguise
We tend to picture a stressed teenager as visibly panicked, tearful or overwhelmed. In reality, the signs are often quieter and more contradictory. Some young people become withdrawn and unusually calm, others grow irritable over trivial things. A child who suddenly declares they “don’t care” about an exam may be masking real fear rather than genuine indifference.
Physical clues matter too. Headaches, stomach aches, disrupted sleep and changes in appetite are common ways that stress shows up in the body long before a young person can put it into words. When these appear alongside a big exam season, they are worth paying attention to rather than dismissing.
The Signs That Get Explained Away
Part of the challenge is that many warning signs overlap with ordinary adolescent behaviour. A few worth watching more closely include:
– Pulling away from friends or hobbies that used to matter
– Working late into the night yet seeming to achieve very little
– Becoming perfectionist about small tasks while avoiding the exam itself
– Frequent reassurance-seeking, or the opposite, refusing to discuss revision at all
None of these guarantees a problem on its own. Taken together, or when they mark a clear shift from how a young person normally behaves, they deserve a gentle conversation.
Why Bright Students Are Not Immune
There is a common assumption that high-achieving students cope better. Often the reverse is true. Ambitious young people can place enormous pressure on themselves, and the fear of falling short of their own standards can be heavier than any external expectation. Specialist sixth-form colleges see this pattern regularly, which is why structured pastoral support is built into how the best of them work. Institutions such as colleges that combine academic ambition with dedicated pastoral care understand that results and wellbeing are not competing priorities but two sides of the same coin.
Mander Portman Woodward has long argued that small class sizes and close tutor relationships make it far easier to spot when a student is struggling, precisely because someone is paying attention to the individual rather than the average.
What Parents Can Actually Do
Once you notice the signs, the instinct is often to fix things quickly. A calmer approach tends to work better. Ask open questions rather than launching into solutions. Protect sleep, meals and downtime, because a brain that is exhausted cannot revise well anyway. Reassure your child that their worth is not measured by a single grade, and mean it.
It also helps to keep perspective yourself. Young people are quick to absorb a parent’s anxiety, so staying steady is one of the most useful things you can offer. If the stress seems to be tipping into something more serious, involving the school or a professional early is a sign of good judgement, not failure.
The mother with the emptying biscuit tin eventually sat down with her son, not to interrogate him but simply to listen. It turned out he had been terrified of disappointing her. That single conversation changed nothing about the exam timetable, but it changed everything about how he faced it. More on the college’s approach can be found at https://mpw.ac.uk.
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*This article was contributed by the team at Mander Portman Woodward (MPW), a group of independent sixth-form colleges based in London, Birmingham and Cambridge. Known for small class sizes, individually tailored teaching and strong pastoral care, MPW supports students through GCSE and A Level study, including university preparation and Oxbridge guidance.*