MTC 2026 Post-Mortem: Why Timed Tests Trigger Maths Anxiety and How to Rebuild Confidence for Year 5

When I looked into this after the DfE released its 2026 administration guidance, what stood out to me was how much of the official documentation focuses on access arrangements. There are provisions for additional time, for alternative input devices, for readers and scribes. The fact that so much of the guidance is dedicated to these arrangements tells its own story: the default format does not work for a significant proportion of children.

The MTC gives pupils 6 seconds per question across 25 questions in a digital interface. For a child with dyscalculia, ADHD, dyslexia, or maths anxiety, that countdown is not a neutral feature. It is a pressure trigger. Research on maths anxiety is consistent on this point: timed testing activates the brain's threat response, which actively impairs working memory. The very skill being tested gets worse under the conditions of the test.

A child who genuinely knows their six times table can blank completely under a 6-second timer. That is not a knowledge gap. That is anxiety doing what anxiety does.

Access arrangements help at the point of assessment, but they do not build the underlying confidence that a child needs to feel genuinely fluent. That has to happen in the months before, in the everyday practice environment.

We are a young company, so I will be honest about the scale of what I am seeing. But in our early conversations with teachers and SENCOs, the pattern is clear. The MTC creates a spike of urgency in June, the data gets submitted, and then September arrives and the same cohort of children (now in Year 5, with a year to go until they might face the check again as a Year 6 catch-up concern) slides back to the bottom of the intervention pile.

What we keep hearing is something like: "We know they need more practice, but every time we drill them on times tables it makes the anxiety worse, not better."

That tension is real. Traditional flashcard drilling and worksheet repetition are not neutral activities for anxious learners. They replicate exactly the pressure that made the MTC difficult in the first place.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, "The whole point is that practice should feel different from the test. If practice feels like a smaller version of the thing that scared them, you are not building confidence, you are reinforcing the fear."

The DfE guidance on MTC access arrangements is genuinely useful at the point of the check itself. Extended time, pausing the timer, use of a prompter: these are all legitimate and important. But here is what I think gets missed in the post-MTC conversation.

Access arrangements are accommodations. They adjust the environment to reduce disadvantage. What they do not do is change how a child feels about their own maths ability. A child who needed extended time to complete the MTC still walks away with a score, and often with a story in their head about being the one who needed extra help.

The work that matters most happens after the check, in the period from now until next spring. That is when schools have the chance to help children rebuild, or build for the first time, a genuine sense of competence with times tables.

From what I have read and from the conversations we are having, the approaches that work for anxious and neurodivergent learners share a few things in common.

First, remove the visible countdown. Or at least, decouple the first stages of practice from any time pressure. Let fluency develop before speed is introduced. The 6-second MTC timer should not be the default setting for everyday practice.

Second, use engagement that comes from within, not from external threat. Multiplayer formats, familiar game mechanics, a sense of play: these shift the emotional context of times tables practice from "test I might fail" to "game I want to play again". This is not a gimmick. For children with ADHD especially, intrinsic motivation is not a nice-to-have, it is the mechanism through which learning happens at all.

Third, make progress visible in small increments. Neurodivergent learners often struggle with the abstract long-term goal of "know all your times tables". Concrete, immediate feedback on small achievements matters enormously for sustaining engagement.

Fourth, involve parents. The MTC period often surfaces anxiety that carries home. Parents who understand how to support low-pressure practice at home are a real asset in the rebuild phase.

XTables Champions is a times-tables and maths fluency web app designed specifically for children with maths anxiety, SEND needs, and neurodivergent learners. The core of what we have built is multiplayer games that children already recognise and want to play, layered over real times-tables practice.

The idea is straightforward: if the emotional experience of practice is positive and motivating, children do more of it, and fluency builds naturally. We have thought carefully about the design choices that matter for SEND learners, from visual clarity to pacing to how feedback is delivered.

We are not claiming to fix everything. But we are building something that tries to solve the exact problem that surfaces every June when the MTC data comes in: children who need more practice but for whom more pressure makes things worse.

If you are a Year 4 or 5 teacher, a SENCO, or a senior leader looking at your MTC data right now and thinking about what to do differently before next year, I would genuinely love to hear from you.

We are a small, founder-led company and we are actively talking to schools to understand what is and is not working for SEND and anxious learners. If you want to see what XTables Champions looks like and talk through whether it fits your cohort, get in touch via xtableschampions.com. The summer term is nearly over, but the planning for next year starts now.