The Multiplication Tables Check does not cause maths anxiety on its own. The way we prepare children for it does. That is my honest takeaway after spending the past few weeks reading through the educator forums, union statements, and parent threads that exploded online in the days following the June 2026 Year 4 MTC sitting. The discussion is loud, it is urgent, and from where I am sitting at XTables Champions, it is one we have been thinking about since the day we started.
What Actually Happened After the June MTC
If you missed it, here is a quick summary of what I have been reading. Following this summer's MTC, teachers on TES forums and parents across social media shared a wave of accounts describing children in tears, refusing to go to school, and telling their parents they were "stupid at maths." Unions and child psychologists began calling publicly for alternative, lower-pressure fluency assessments. The argument is not that children should not know their times tables. It is that the six-week sprint of timed drills and rapid-fire flashcard repetition that many schools defaulted to left a cohort of Year 4 children genuinely frightened of numbers.
What stood out to me reading through these accounts is how consistent the picture is. It is not one school, one borough, one kind of child. It is a pattern.
The Problem with Rote Drilling
Drill-and-kill teaching, the relentless repetition of multiplication facts under timed pressure, does produce a certain kind of result: children who can blurt out 7 x 8 on demand, in isolation, under calm conditions. What it often does not produce is children who understand *why* 7 x 8 is 56, or who can use that fact flexibly when a word problem dresses it up differently.
The real damage, though, is not about conceptual gaps. It is about what timed pressure does to a child's relationship with maths.
When I looked into the research around maths anxiety, what comes up repeatedly is that timed testing is one of the most reliable triggers. Children who already find maths difficult, including many children with dyslexia, ADHD, or processing differences, can go into a kind of cognitive freeze under time pressure. Their working memory, which is already being stretched, gets hijacked by the stress response. They forget things they actually know. They leave the room feeling like failures. And then they carry that feeling into Year 5, and Year 6, and beyond.
From the schools we speak to in our early conversations, this is not a rare edge case. It is something teachers are describing regularly, especially for their neurodivergent pupils.
What the Unions and Psychologists Are Actually Asking For
The calls I have seen from unions and child development professionals are not asking for the MTC to be abolished. They are asking for preparation methods that build genuine fluency rather than surface-level recall under duress. That means exposure to multiplication facts in varied, low-stakes contexts. It means children encountering the same number relationships in different formats, over time, so that understanding actually beds in. It means not treating a single sit-down test as the only performance that matters.
This is, funnily enough, exactly the design brief behind XTables Champions.
As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, *"We built this because we kept seeing bright kids decide they were 'not maths people' before they even hit Year 5. That is not a maths problem. That is a confidence problem, and it starts with how we teach."*
How Game-Based Learning Builds Real Fluency
When I looked at what the evidence base says about game-based learning for multiplication fluency, a few things come through clearly. Games lower the affective filter, the psychological barrier that goes up when children feel evaluated. When a child is playing Snap or a Connect Four variant, their brain is in a problem-solving mode rather than a performance mode. They encounter the same multiplication facts repeatedly, but because the context keeps shifting, they are actually rehearsing retrieval in a more durable way.
At XTables Champions, the games are built around formats children already enjoy: Snap, Connect Four, Bingo, Battleship, Guess Who, Dominoes, Sudoku. They are multiplayer, which means children are engaged socially, not just drilling in isolation. The "Show Me How" visual breakdowns inside the platform mean a child who does not immediately know 9 x 6 can see why it works, not just be told to memorise it.
For neurodivergent pupils specifically, this matters enormously. A child with ADHD who cannot sit still for a ten-minute flashcard session will often stay completely absorbed in a competitive game for twenty minutes without noticing. A child with dyslexia who struggles with written number work can engage with visual, pattern-based formats that play to different strengths. The platform also includes SENCO flags so that teachers and support staff can see which children may need additional support, without waiting for a crisis.
What Schools Can Actually Do Right Now
If you are a teacher, SENCO, or school leader trying to work out what to do differently before next June, here is how I would think about it.
The first thing worth doing is auditing *how* your current MTC preparation is structured. If the majority of it is timed drills and flashcard repetition, that is worth reconsidering, not because those tools are always harmful, but because they should not be the only approach, and they should not be the dominant one for children who are already anxious.
Second, consider whether your Year 3 and Year 4 timetable creates enough low-stakes, repeated exposure to multiplication facts across different contexts. Games, physical activities, number talks, collaborative puzzles. The more varied the context, the more robust the memory.
Third, think specifically about your neurodivergent pupils. Children with ADHD, dyslexia, or high anxiety around performance are often the ones who suffer most in a drill-heavy environment, and they are also the ones most likely to thrive when the format changes.
Talk to Us Before Next June
If what I have described here resonates with what you are seeing in your school, or with your child at home, I would genuinely encourage you to get in touch with us at XTables Champions. We are a young, founder-led company and we are actively working with schools to understand what support looks like in practice. Whether you are a Year 4 teacher wanting to rethink your MTC prep, a SENCO looking for tools that work for neurodivergent learners, or a parent who watched their child come home anxious after the June check, we want to hear from you.
Visit xtableschampions.com to find out more, or get in touch directly to talk about how we might support your school or your child. No hard sell, no complicated process. Just a conversation about what would actually help.