It has increasingly become clear to me that most chess teaching is, at best, misdirected. The reason is that most professional chess teachers have an excellent knowledge of chess but little idea of what can be expected from their pupils, and whether or not they will be able to assimilate and process the information in a meaningful way.

From what we know about children's cognitive development we can demonstrate, by and large, that children in Infant Schools can probably learn how the pieces move, but that many of them will not, at least without significant adult assistance, be able to understand a fairly complex abstract concept such as Checkmate.

Children of Junior School age will be able to learn to play a complete game of chess, but, because they can only use simple logic rather than complex logic most of them won't be able to work anything out for themselves with any degree of accuracy. Children of this age usually learn chess in the first instance by a combination of memory and mimicry, and they cannot do this without proactive parental support. If you teach them something one week they'll have forgotten it by the next week.