Emotional Safety Is the Missing Ingredient in Multiplayer Maths EdTech. Here's Why It Matters.

Recent research and commentary from sources including EdTechReview and Alter-Learning has started putting a name to something that many teachers and SENCOs have known quietly for years. The boom in multiplayer maths platforms, head-to-head duels, live leaderboards and timed knockout rounds, is genuinely exciting for a lot of children. Engagement goes up. Repetition happens more naturally. Fluency can improve.

But when I looked into this more carefully, one phrase kept surfacing in the discussion: "emotional safety." It is being described as the critical missing ingredient for neurodivergent learners and children who already carry anxiety about maths. And the more I read, the more I thought: yes, exactly.

The issue is not that multiplayer is inherently bad. The issue is that most platforms have been designed with the average, confident learner in mind. The competitive pressure, the public failure, the ticking clock, these are features that drive engagement for some children. For others, they are the reason a child shuts down, refuses to play, or quietly learns to believe they are simply "bad at maths."

There is a reasonable body of evidence, from researchers like Dr. Jo Boaler and others working in maths education, that timed testing conditions can actively worsen maths anxiety rather than build fluency. This is not a fringe view. It is increasingly mainstream in primary education thinking here in the UK.

What stands out to me is how little this has translated into the design of actual EdTech products. Many of the most widely used multiplayer maths apps still default to: fastest finger wins, your score is visible to the class, and losing is loud and immediate. For a Year 5 child who is already anxious, that is not motivation. That is confirmation of their worst fear about themselves.

From the schools and SENCOs we speak to in our early conversations, this tension comes up again and again. Teachers genuinely want tools that build engagement. They also know their most vulnerable learners are the first ones to disengage the moment a platform makes them feel exposed.

This is the part I find genuinely exciting about where we are with XTables Champions. We did not build a competitive maths app and then try to patch in some SEND-friendly features as an afterthought. We started from the question: how do you get a child who is frightened of maths to want to play a maths game?

The answer, for us, came from watching how children actually play the games they love. Popular games, the ones kids come back to voluntarily, rarely make failure loud and public. They build in breathing room. They give you another go. They let you play at your own pace before stepping up the stakes.

Multiplayer engagement and emotional safety are not opposites. You can have both, if you design for both from the start.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, "We kept asking ourselves, what would make a child who hates maths actually want to come back tomorrow? The answer was never a leaderboard."

That thinking is baked into how XTables Champions works. We use the formats of games children already know and love, with multiplayer modes that are built to feel fun and low-stakes rather than exposing. The goal is repeated, joyful practice. That is how fluency actually builds.

If you are a Year 4 to 6 teacher, a SENCO, or a senior leader evaluating maths fluency tools right now, I would encourage you to ask one question of every platform you look at: what happens to the child who is slowest, or who gets the answer wrong?

If the answer is "they are publicly last on a leaderboard" or "they lose the duel in front of their peers," that platform has not been designed with your most anxious learners in mind. It may still be useful for some children. But it is probably not the right tool for the pupils who need the most support.

The industry is starting to catch up with what teachers have known all along. Emotional safety is not a soft, nice-to-have. It is the precondition for learning. A child who feels safe will practice. A child who feels exposed will avoid.

In our early conversations with schools, what we keep hearing from SENCOs in particular is that they are tired of recommending tools that work brilliantly for most of the class and quietly fail the children on their caseload. That is the gap we are trying to close.

I think 2025 is a genuinely important moment in this conversation. The industry has proven that children will engage with game-based maths learning. That part works. Now the question is whether EdTech companies are willing to do the harder design work of making that engagement accessible to every learner, not just the ones who were already confident.

Emotional safety needs to stop being a marketing phrase and start being a design constraint. That means things like: allowing children to practise privately before going multiplayer, removing punishing failure states, avoiding designs that make a child's struggle visible to their whole class without their consent, and building in the kind of gentle repetition that builds confidence before it tests it.

None of this means dumbing things down. It means designing up.

If you are a primary school teacher, SENCO, or senior leader thinking about how to support children with maths anxiety, I would genuinely love for you to see what we have built. XTables Champions is designed from the ground up for the learners who have been let down by high-pressure, one-size-fits-all approaches to times-tables practice.

Get in touch with us at xtableschampions.com to find out more or to start a conversation about how XTables Champions could support your pupils, especially those with maths anxiety, SEND or neurodivergent needs. We are a small, founder-led team and we genuinely welcome talking to the educators who understand this challenge best.