If you work in a US school district right now, you already know the ESSER money is gone. The final liquidation deadline for ARP ESSER funding passed in March 2026, and what I keep reading across K-12 Dive and EdSurge is the same story repeated in district after district: the tutoring programmes that carried kids through the post-pandemic recovery are being cut, just as math anxiety among elementary students remains critically high. That is the problem this article is about, and I want to be direct about it rather than dance around it.
The question I'm trying to answer here is a practical one. With the human tutoring infrastructure being dismantled, what actually works to keep math fluency moving forward, especially for children with maths anxiety, SEND needs or neurodivergent profiles?
What the Fiscal Cliff Actually Means for Math Recovery
The phrase "fiscal cliff" has been thrown around a lot, but it is worth being concrete about what it means in classrooms. Districts in states like California and Texas leaned heavily on ESSER extensions to fund one-to-one and small-group tutoring, particularly for students who fell furthest behind during COVID-19 school closures. Those programmes produced real results. The problem is they were built on emergency funding that was always temporary.
What I find striking when I read the budget reporting coming out of large districts right now is not just that the money is gone. It is that the need has not gone with it. Post-pandemic math anxiety among elementary-age children is still running at levels that were considered alarming even before COVID. The disruption to routine, the isolation, the gaps in foundational number work, particularly times tables and multiplication fluency in Years 4 through 6, did not resolve themselves when schools re-opened. For neurodivergent children, many of whom rely on structured routine and consistent repetition to build automaticity, those gaps have been especially stubborn.
So districts are now in a genuinely difficult position. The expensive, high-touch interventions are going. The need remains. What fills that space?
Why One-to-One Tutoring Was Always a Partial Answer
I want to be fair here. High-quality human tutoring, done well, is extraordinarily effective. I am not arguing against it. But when I looked into how those ESSER-funded tutoring programmes were actually deployed at scale, a few tensions become clear.
First, they were difficult to sustain consistently. Recruiting and retaining qualified tutors, especially for maths, was a genuine bottleneck even when the funding existed. Second, the model is inherently limited by adult availability. A child with maths anxiety who needs repeated, low-stakes exposure to multiplication facts cannot get that from a single weekly tutoring session. The anxiety itself often makes the one-to-one dynamic uncomfortable for the child, particularly if they feel put on the spot.
Third, and this is something we keep hearing in our early conversations with schools, neurodivergent children often respond very differently to peer-based or game-based learning than they do to adult-directed instruction. The social dynamic of a tutoring session can itself be a source of stress rather than relief.
What Actually Lowers Math Anxiety at Scale
When I looked into the research on maths anxiety interventions, a few things come through clearly. Repeated, low-stakes exposure to the material matters. Reducing the feeling of being evaluated in real time matters. And engagement, genuine engagement, not compliance, matters enormously.
This is where gamification becomes more than a buzzword. There is a meaningful difference between a drill dressed up with a few badges and a learning environment built around games that children actually want to play. The second type does something the first does not: it changes the child's relationship with the material. A child who is anxious about being wrong in front of a teacher is often perfectly comfortable trying again in a game context, because the emotional stakes feel different.
At XTables Champions, this is exactly what we have built towards. Our platform uses popular game formats that children already recognise and enjoy, with a strong emphasis on multiplayer modes. The multiplayer element is deliberate. It creates a social context for maths practice that feels like play rather than assessment, which is particularly significant for children who have internalised the belief that they are "bad at maths."
As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, "We wanted to build something where a child who dreads maths on Monday can genuinely be looking forward to it by Friday, not because we tricked them, but because the experience itself is actually fun."
For neurodivergent children specifically, the structured, predictable nature of game-based repetition is valuable in a way that more open-ended approaches are not. The rules are clear. The feedback is immediate. The child can practise at their own pace without feeling watched.
The Sustainability Argument for EdTech in a Post-ESSER World
I want to be straightforward about this without overstating what we are as a company. XTables Champions is a young, founder-led business. We are not claiming to replace everything that high-quality human teaching provides. What we are saying is that for the specific challenge of times-tables fluency and math fact automaticity, which is genuinely foundational for all the higher maths that follows, scalable software built with SEND-friendly design offers something that scales in a way individual tutoring cannot.
A single school-wide licence covers every student. The children who need more repetition get more repetition. The children who need the low-stakes environment get it. And the SENCO or class teacher is not stretched even thinner trying to coordinate yet another intervention programme.
For districts that built their math recovery strategy around ESSER-funded tutoring, the question now is not "how do we recreate what we had" but "what can we sustain that keeps the progress going." That is a different question, and it opens the door to tools that were always more scalable but perhaps felt optional when funding was flush.
What Schools in California, Texas and Beyond Are Asking Right Now
From what I am reading and the early conversations we are having, the questions coming from senior leaders and SENCOs in US elementary schools right now are pretty consistent. How do we maintain math fluency gains without the tutoring headcount? What works for our students with the highest anxiety levels? What can our teachers actually implement without adding to their workload?
Those are the right questions. And they are exactly the questions XTables Champions was designed to answer, not just for a UK context but for any school where post-pandemic math recovery and neurodivergent support are real priorities.
Talk to Us About Your School's Math Recovery Needs
If your district is working through what math intervention looks like for the 2026/27 school year without ESSER funding behind it, I would genuinely encourage you to get in touch with us at XTables Champions. Whether you are a principal, a curriculum lead, a SENCO, or a classroom teacher trying to figure out what comes next for your most anxious learners, we are happy to have a real conversation about what your school needs and whether our platform is a fit.
You can reach us through xtableschampions.com. No hard sell, just an honest conversation about the problem you are trying to solve.