How to get improve general problem solving skills and for MAT

The UKMT do some good books for problem solving

I know that they have quite a selection of books. Which ones would you recommend in my position seeing as my senior maths challenge skills are poor.

I know that they have quite a selection of books. Which ones would you recommend in my position seeing as my senior maths challenge skills are poor.

Well I have almost all of them, and the one I stared with was the ‘introduction to number theory’, so I would recommend that one, but the best way to get better at the Senior Maths Challenge is to practice past papers, you can also practice past papers for the intermediate maths challenge and intermediate olympiads if you find the senior maths challenge too difficult.

Its probably worth thinking about both general problem solving skills as well as topic specific techniques. For general problem solving I like
https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/9478#t=aboutBook
as its readable and lots of simple problems (challenge level). You can download the intro/chapter 1 to get a gentle intro. For topic specific stuff you could look at frost mat/step/ukmt slides https://www.drfrost.org/downloadables.php?noid=917 or the Senior Problems (smc) or Problem Solvers Handbook (imc) from ukmt or the Olympiad primer.
Worth being clear though that this stuff should be supplemental to actual mat/livestream practice.

I have already sat one of the specimen papers just to get a good feel for the questions and have the online spec outlined on what and not what to revise but I think being able to answer Olympiad type questions will most definitely help for the later questions especially for questions 4 and 5. Thanks for the recommendation.