If you teach Year 4 in a UK primary school, April is one of the most important months on your maths calendar, and it is not because of anything new on the curriculum. Every spring, the Department for Education opens a "try it out" area for the Multiplication Tables Check, giving pupils a chance to sit inside the actual digital interface and feel the reality of that 6-second answer window before the real thing arrives in June. My strong take: this window is not a nice-to-have. It is one of the most valuable preparation opportunities of the year, and a lot of schools are not using it as deliberately as they could be.
What the MTC Try It Out Area Actually Is
The try it out area is an official DfE resource, hosted through the GOV.UK Education Hub, that mirrors the real Multiplication Tables Check environment as closely as possible. Pupils see the same screen layout, hear the same prompts and, critically, face the same 6-second time limit per question that will apply in June. It is not a worksheet. It is not a general times tables quiz. It replicates the specific conditions of the check itself.
When I looked into this more carefully, what stood out to me is how many pupils who know their times tables reasonably well still struggle when the 6-second clock is ticking on an unfamiliar screen. The format is the stressor, not just the maths. That matters enormously for how teachers should be using April.
Why the 6-Second Limit Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds
Six seconds is genuinely short. For a confident child who has drilled their tables, it feels fast but manageable. For a child who has to work through a calculation, it can feel like the screen disappears before they have finished thinking.
The problem is that many schools practise times tables in ways that do not replicate this pressure at all. Call-and-response, paper tests, apps that let pupils set their own pace, these are all useful, but they do not train the specific response speed the MTC demands. The try it out window in April exists precisely to close that gap, but only if pupils have already been building the right kind of fluency in the weeks before.
This is something we keep hearing in our early conversations with primary schools. Teachers are confident their pupils know the times tables. What catches them out is the combination of the screen, the clock and the absence of any warm-up time. Those three things together create a different kind of challenge.
How to Use April Well (Before and During the Window)
The schools that get the most from the try it out area are the ones that treat it as a rehearsal, not a first introduction. Here is what I think a deliberate April looks like.
In the first two weeks of April, the focus should be on timed digital practice that mirrors the 6-second constraint. Pupils need repeated exposure to answering under a tight clock on a screen before they enter the official environment. This is not about drilling the same questions; it is about training the speed and the calm.
Once the try it out area is open, ideally in a structured classroom session rather than as a take-home task, let pupils experience the real interface. Watch where they hesitate. Note which tables cause the most dropped answers under time pressure. This is diagnostic gold.
After the session, use what you have observed. If a cluster of pupils are consistently losing time on their 7s and 8s, the remaining weeks before June have a clear focus. The try it out window gives you real data you simply cannot get from a worksheet.
As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, *"The check itself is not the scary part. It's the gap between how children practise and what the check actually feels like that we want to close."*
What London Schools Are Showing the Rest of the Country
London consistently produces some of the strongest MTC results in England, and from what I am seeing, part of that pattern comes down to how systematically certain schools embed timed digital practice into their year groups. It is not that London pupils are learning different times tables. It is that the format of practice is closer to the format of the check.
That is a transferable lesson for any school in any region. The try it out window is available to every Year 4 class in the country. What varies is whether schools use it as a passive tick-box or as genuine structured preparation.
Where XTables Champions Fits In
XTables Champions is built specifically around the MTC format. The 6-second question timer, the digital interface, the focus on the 121 questions that make up the MTC question set: these are not add-ons to our platform. They are the whole point.
For schools heading into April, that means pupils can be practising in an environment that is as close as possible to the real check before the official try it out area even opens. By the time a Year 4 class sits inside the DfE's own interface, the format should already feel familiar. That familiarity is what reduces anxiety and lets the maths do the talking.
We are a young company and I will not overstate where we are, but what I can say honestly is that the teachers we are speaking to keep coming back to the same thing: they want their pupils to have practised the experience, not just the content.
Get Your Year 4s Ready Before June
If you are a Year 4 teacher or a primary school maths lead, April is the moment to act. The try it out window will open, it will close, and then June will arrive very quickly. The schools that use this period well are the ones that have already been building MTC-specific fluency in the weeks before.
If you want to see how XTables Champions supports Year 4 MTC preparation, including the timed 6-second practice that mirrors the real check, get in touch with us at xtableschampions.com. We are happy to talk through what your school needs and whether we can help. No hard sell, just a genuine conversation about what your Year 4s are facing this term.