Hiding Maths Anxiety: Timed Tests Freeze | Times Tables App

When I looked into the 2026 work coming from the University of Cambridge's Maths Anxiety Research Group, one figure stopped me in my tracks. Up to 77% of children identified with high maths anxiety are actually normal-to-high achievers. Not struggling learners who haven't grasped the concepts. Bright, capable children who simply cannot perform under pressure.

This matters enormously, because the instinct for most parents and teachers is to assume that a child who freezes or makes errors during a timed maths test must not know the material well enough. So we give them more drills. More repetition. More pressure. And the cycle gets worse, not better.

What the research points to instead is something called working memory overload. When a child is aware of a timer ticking, that awareness itself consumes cognitive resources. Their brain is now doing two things at once: trying to retrieve a maths fact, and simultaneously managing anxiety. For a child already prone to maths anxiety, there simply isn't enough working memory left to do both. The result is a blank. A freeze. A score that looks like ignorance but is actually just stress.

Working memory is the brain's mental scratchpad. It's what allows a child to hold a question in mind while they work through the steps to answer it. It's finite, and it's easily disrupted.

Researchers have known for some time that anxiety competes directly with working memory. What the Cambridge group's more recent work adds is specificity around maths anxiety in children who are, by other measures, performing well academically. These are not children who need rescuing from the curriculum. They are children whose relationship with maths has been quietly damaged by the format of how they are tested.

I find this particularly worth sitting with because it reframes the question parents need to be asking. Instead of "why can't my child do maths?", the more useful question is "does my child feel safe enough to show what they know?"

Maths anxiety doesn't always look like crying or refusing to go to school. In high-achieving children it often looks more like this:

They perform well in class discussions but fall apart in timed conditions. They can explain a concept confidently but make simple errors on worksheets. They describe themselves as "bad at maths" despite clear evidence to the contrary. They catastrophise before tests, even when they've revised thoroughly. They avoid asking for help because they don't want to seem less capable.

If any of those sound familiar, the issue is almost certainly not the maths itself.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, "The children we hear about most often are the ones nobody expected to struggle. They're sharp, they get the concept, but something about the pressure of being watched and timed just switches them off. That's the problem we built XTables to fix."

One thing I want to address directly, because I see it come up constantly in parent conversations, is the confusion between maths anxiety and dyscalculia. Dyscalculia is a specific learning difference affecting numerical processing, somewhat analogous to dyslexia for reading. It's neurological, persistent, and affects a child's ability to understand number concepts even in relaxed, low-pressure environments.

Maths anxiety is different. A child with maths anxiety can and often does demonstrate genuine understanding outside of high-pressure contexts. The knowledge is there. The anxiety is what's blocking it.

This distinction matters practically, because the support a child needs differs depending on which is at play. A formal SENCO referral may be appropriate for dyscalculia. For maths anxiety, particularly the working memory overload type the Cambridge research describes, the intervention is largely about changing the environment and the emotional association with maths, not the curriculum itself.

Here's what I'm seeing, both in the research and in the early conversations we're having with schools and parents: when you remove the timer and replace pressure with play, children who previously appeared to be struggling start to shine.

That's not magic. It's just working memory being freed up to do its actual job.

When a child plays a game of Snap or Connect Four using times tables cards, their brain is focused on the game. The maths is still happening. The recall is still being practised. But the anxiety pathway is quiet, because there's no countdown, no audience waiting for a score, no moment of judgement. The working memory that was previously being consumed by stress is now available for actual mathematical thinking.

This is precisely why XTables Champions is built around multiplayer games rather than drills. Games like Snap, Bingo, Connect Four and Battleship create repeated, natural exposure to times tables facts in a context that feels social and enjoyable rather than evaluative. The Show Me How™ feature adds a visual breakdown so children can build genuine understanding, not just surface-level recall. And because the platform tracks progress quietly in the background, parents and teachers get a real picture of what a child knows, rather than a snapshot distorted by test anxiety.

From the schools we speak to, the children who benefit most from this kind of approach are often exactly the ones the Cambridge research describes: capable, engaged learners who have been let down not by the curriculum but by the format.

There's a stubborn assumption in primary education that speed equals mastery. If you can fire off 7x8 in under two seconds, you must really know it. But that's a narrow and often misleading measure.

Deep conceptual understanding, the kind that allows a child to apply a maths fact flexibly in an unfamiliar context, doesn't require speed. It requires a relaxed, well-practised brain that has encountered the same material in enough different ways to actually own it. Slow, social, repeated exposure through varied formats is how that happens. Timed drills, especially for children already prone to anxiety, often do the opposite: they create fragile, pressure-dependent recall that evaporates exactly when it matters most.

The research from Cambridge isn't telling us to make maths easier. It's telling us to make the conditions for learning safer. Those are very different things.

If this article has resonated with you, whether you're a parent who recognises your child in these descriptions, a teacher noticing a pattern in your class, or a SENCO looking for a low-pressure tool to support anxious learners, I'd encourage you to explore what XTables Champions offers and get in touch with us directly.

We're a young company, and we're genuinely interested in the real situations families and schools are navigating. If you want to talk through whether our platform might suit your child or your pupils, reach out via xtableschampions.com. We're happy to have an honest conversation about what we do, how it works, and whether it might help.