She was sitting in the third row of a Year 10 English class, and she was doing something I have seen hundreds of students do. She was staring at the board with an expression that looked like concentration. Her posture was good. Her pen was in her hand. Her teacher, walking between desks, would have had no reason to stop. But if you watched her eyes, you would notice they were not tracking the text on the screen. They were fixed on a point slightly to the left of the projector. She was somewhere else entirely.
After the lesson, I asked her what she had been thinking about during the discussion of An Inspector Calls. She looked embarrassed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I was trying to listen. I just sort of… wasn’t.”
This is not a disorder. It is not a deficit. It is the ordinary experience of a human brain that has never been taught how attention actually works.
Attention is not a moral quality
In most schools, attention is treated as a character trait. Good students pay attention. Distracted students need to try harder. The implicit model is simple: attention is a matter of will. If you care enough, you will focus.
Benjamin Sharpe, a researcher at the University of Chichester, has spent several years studying exactly this assumption — and dismantling it. His work on sustained attention in classroom environments, published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2025, demonstrated that human attention reliably declines after approximately twenty-five minutes, regardless of motivation or interest. The study investigated the impact of micro-breaks on student attention and quiz performance, grounded in cognitive load theory and spaced learning. The findings confirmed what attentional researchers have argued for decades: perfect sustained attention is fundamentally impossible due to inherent neural, biological, and cognitive limitations.
Sharpe’s conclusion is precise and worth sitting with. Rather than attempting to overcome these constraints, he argues, educational practices should be designed to work harmoniously with the fundamental properties of human cognitive architecture.
This is a coaching insight, not a clinical one. The question is not what is wrong with a student who loses focus after twenty minutes. The question is why we designed a system that demands fifty minutes of unbroken attention from brains that cannot provide it.
The phone is not the only problem
The contemporary narrative about student attention is dominated by technology — smartphones, social media, short-form video. A 2024 study in the Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics examined the impact of short video reels on university students’ attention and found that the fragmented consumption patterns of platforms like TikTok and Instagram contrasted sharply with the structured delivery of information in classrooms, leading to cognitive overload during transitions. The researchers applied cognitive load theory to argue that educators can mitigate these effects by designing instructional materials that account for students’ diminished attentional resources.
This research is valuable, but it can also mislead. It suggests that the attention problem is new — a product of the smartphone era. In reality, attentional limitations are ancient. What has changed is not the brain’s capacity to focus but the demands placed upon it and the absence of any systematic instruction in managing those demands.
In my coaching work, I distinguish between three attentional skills that students need and almost never receive explicit training in. The first is selective attention — the ability to choose what to focus on and suppress competing stimuli. The second is sustained attention — the ability to maintain focus over time on a task that may not be intrinsically rewarding. The third is attentional recovery — the ability to recognise when focus has been lost and redirect it without self-criticism. Most classroom instruction assumes all three. None are taught.
What a coach teaches that a teacher cannot
Teachers are not failing to teach attention. They are doing the best they can within a system that gives them no time, no training, and no framework for it. A teacher’s job is to deliver content, assess learning, and manage a room of thirty students with varying needs. Attention is the precondition for all of this work, but it is not the teacher’s subject.
A mental performance coach approaches attention differently. Not as a precondition to be assumed, but as a skill to be developed. In sport, this is unremarkable. A goalkeeper trains peripheral vision. A tennis player trains focus between points. A sprinter trains the ability to narrow attention to the starter’s gun. These are specific, rehearsable, measurable attentional capacities.
The same approach applies in education. A student preparing for an exam can learn a pre-task focusing routine — a thirty-second sequence of breathing, visual anchoring, and internal cueing that shifts the nervous system from distraction to readiness. A student who loses focus mid-lesson can learn an attentional reset — a brief, deliberate disengagement (eyes to a fixed point, three slow breaths, return) that recovers concentration without disrupting the class. A student who catastrophises after losing focus (“I’ve missed ten minutes, now I’ll fail”) can learn cognitive reappraisal — reframing the lost attention as normal and recoverable rather than evidence of failure.
These are not motivational platitudes. They are specific performance techniques drawn from the same evidence base that supports elite athletic preparation.
The neuroscience is clear, and the schools are not listening
A 2025 scoping review published in Brain Sciences examined neural evidence of attention in classroom environments and found that classroom attention is a fundamental cognitive function crucial to effective learning, and that recent advances in investigating neural correlates provide insights that could enhance educational outcomes. The review noted that attention is not a single, unitary process but a set of interrelated capacities that develop at different rates through childhood and adolescence.
Adele Diamond, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia, has been making a related argument for over a decade. Executive functions — working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility — are the foundational cognitive architecture upon which academic performance is built. Diamond’s research has consistently shown that these capacities are trainable, that they predict academic outcomes more reliably than IQ, and that they are most responsive to training during childhood and adolescence.
A 2025 study in the International Journal of Psychological Research examined the relationship between executive functions and emotional self-regulation in 531 children and adolescents and found significant correlations between the two. The researchers concluded that executive functions enable planning, organising, decision-making, and adapting to educational demands — and that their development is inseparable from emotional regulation.
This is the opportunity that mental performance coaching offers education. Not to fix attention. To train it. Not to diagnose attention deficits. To develop attentional skills in every student, recognising that these capacities are developmental, trainable, and consequential.
The cost of doing nothing
The student in the third row was not struggling because she lacked intelligence. Her predicted grades were strong. Her teachers described her as “bright but inconsistent.” She could produce excellent work when she was engaged, but engagement was unreliable and she had no strategies for recovering it when it faded.
Without coaching, she would continue to rely on interest and motivation to sustain attention — a strategy that works intermittently and fails precisely when performance matters most. During revision periods. During exams. During the six-hour stretches of focused work that A-levels demand.
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has documented that the average attention span on a single screen has declined from two and a half minutes in 2004 to approximately forty-seven seconds in 2023. Whether or not one accepts the precision of this figure, the trajectory is consistent with what teachers observe daily. Students are arriving in classrooms with less practised sustained attention than previous generations, and schools are offering them no tools to develop it.
The coaching response to this is not despair. It is design. If sustained attention is limited to approximately twenty-five minutes, then break the learning into twenty-five-minute blocks with structured micro-breaks between them, as Sharpe’s research supports. If attentional recovery is a skill, then teach it explicitly — model it, practise it, reward it. If pre-task focusing routines improve performance in sport, trial them before exams and high-stakes classroom tasks.
The girl in the third row, reconsidered
I worked with that student for six sessions across a single term. We did not discuss English literature. We did not discuss motivation. We worked on three things: a pre-lesson focusing routine she could perform in her seat without drawing attention, a mid-lesson attentional reset she could use when she noticed her mind had drifted, and a post-lesson reflection that helped her identify which parts of the class she had retained and which she needed to revisit.
None of these techniques were complex. All of them required practice. By the end of the term, her teacher reported that she was “more consistently present” — a phrase that captures what coaching had achieved more accurately than any test score could.
She had not become smarter. She had not become more motivated. She had developed a set of skills that allowed her brain to do what it was already capable of doing — attend — more reliably and for longer.
Schools teach students mathematics, science, literature, and history. They do not teach students how to attend to mathematics, science, literature, and history. The assumption is that attention is a given — a natural resource that some students have in abundance and others lack. The evidence says otherwise. Attention is a set of trainable skills. And we are sending students into examinations, into classrooms, into their entire educational careers, without teaching them the most fundamental skill of all.
Not what to think.
How to focus long enough to think at all.
ALTIUS Note
This article belongs to the ALTIUS editorial library: evidence-based essays on Human Performance, Leadership and Society.
Selected Research Foundations
Sharpe, B. T., et al. — Sustaining student concentration: the effectiveness of micro-breaks in a classroom setting. Frontiers in Psychology, 2025. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1589411
Diamond, A. — Executive Functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750
Bernal-Ruiz, F., & Cerda, G. — Executive functions and emotional self-regulation in children and adolescents. International Journal of Psychological Research, 2025.
Mark, G. — Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press, 2023.
Australian Education Research Organisation — Attention and Focus. AERO Explainer, 2025. https://www.edresearch.edu.au/summaries-explainers/explainers/attention-and-focus
