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We analyze the convergence of a continuous interior penalty (CIP) method for a singularly perturbed fourth‐order elliptic problem on a layer‐adapted mesh. On this anisotropic mesh, we prove under reasonable assumptions uniform convergence of almost order k − 1 for finite elements of degree k ≥ 2. This result is of better order than the known robust result on standard meshes. A by‐product of our analysis is an analytic lower bound for the penalty of the symmetric CIP method. Finally, our convergence result is verified numerically. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 30: 838–861, 2014

Abstract. Anisotropically refined mixed finite elements are beneficial for the resolution of local features such as boundary layers. Unfortunately, the stability of the resulting scheme is highly sensitive to the aspect ratio of the elements. Previous analysis revealed that the degeneration arises from a relatively small number of spurious (piecewise constant) pressure modes. The present article is concerned with resolving the problem of how to suppress the spurious pressure modes in order to restore stability yet at the same time not incurring any deterioration in the approximation properties of the reduced pressure space.Two results are presented. The first gives the minimal constraints on the pressure space needed to restore stability with respect to aspect ratio and shows that the approximation properties of the constrained pressure space and the unconstrained pressure space are essentially identical. Alternatively, one can impose the constraint weakly through the use of a stabilised finite element scheme. A second result shows that the stabilised finite element scheme is robust with respect to the aspect ratio of the elements and produces an approximation that satisfies an error bound of the same type to the mixed finite element scheme using the constrained space.