My DS can be talked into a concept, so we honestly explained the system to him, what good results at school mean, what doors this opens for you etc. We then discussed his favourite subjects and looked at where he can get to study these. Then took him at all open doors days we could lay our hands on - it came as no surprise he was most impressed with 2 x local indies and one superselective state. That motivated him to go through a year of gruelling tutoring (English is not our first language so extra effort was required), and now we're sitting a string of exams.
Incentives. Well, we took him to Disneyworld on Christmas of Y5, to boost motivation, and that's it really. We have been praising him weekly for getting better and better results at school, where he started jumping grades up and up, plugged in other relatives to regularly encourage him and tell him how proud we are of his efforts, and made a couple of family trips (scheduled anyway, regardless of his studies), to look as part of incentive (but i must say he paid for it - a 9 hour lonh-haul flight turned out to be a great opportunity to do a few papers!!). No money, no gifts, no gadgets (but he's not into it much anyway).
Well, we'll see where it'd get us....
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