This Week in EdTech: MTC Results, Maths Anxiety, and the Global Push for Fluency Without Fear

The Department for Education has now published its full 2024/2025 Multiplication Tables Check attainment data, and when I worked through it this week the regional patterns were striking. London is the highest-performing region with an average score of 21.7 out of 25. The South East and East of England sit at the bottom of the table, both averaging 20.7. When you drill into local authority level, places like Norfolk and Halton look even more concerning, with some averaging closer to 19 out of 25. Halton recorded the lowest average in the country.

Now, a one or two point gap might not sound enormous, but bear in mind this is a 25-question test with a strict six-second window per question. Every point represents a child who ran out of time, guessed, or froze. At scale, across thousands of Year 4 pupils, those gaps point to something systemic.

What is also clear from the data is that the pupils who struggle most are those with SEND and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. These are children who often need the most practice but who are also the most likely to be knocked sideways by time pressure. The MTC was never designed to be a high-stakes moment for individual children, but in practice that is exactly how many of them experience it.

Schools in the lowest-performing regions are heading into September with a new cohort of Year 4 pupils and, from what I am reading, quite a few of them are actively reconsidering how they approach times tables preparation. The June 2026 check will be here faster than it feels right now.

Here is the bit that keeps coming up when I read parent forums and teacher threads: the six-second timer on the MTC is not just a feature of the test. For a lot of children, it becomes the entire emotional experience of learning their tables.

The statutory check gives pupils six seconds to answer each of the 25 questions. That sounds generous until you realise that children who have not yet built automatic recall, who are still using skip-counting or finger strategies, simply cannot get there in time. They know their tables, just not fast enough. And the moment they feel that pressure, many of them stop thinking clearly altogether.

This is not a new finding. Educators have been raising concerns about timed maths tests and anxiety for years. What is newer is how openly parents are now talking about it. I have seen a real uptick in parents searching for ways to practise the MTC without recreating that same clock pressure at home, because they can see their child shutting down every time a timer appears on screen.

The irony is that the best preparation for a timed test is often not more timed tests. Building genuine automaticity, so that the answer just arrives rather than being calculated, takes repeated low-stakes exposure over weeks and months. Drilling with a stopwatch in April is too late and too stressful to be effective.

Gal Darrash, founder of XTables Champions, puts it simply: "We built this because we could see children who genuinely knew their tables falling apart under pressure, and that felt like a solvable problem."

It is.

One of the things I find most interesting about this week's research is how closely the UK picture mirrors what is happening across the Atlantic, even though the two systems look very different on paper.

In Georgia, the state legislature has passed HB 1030, known as the Math Matters Act. Starting in the 2027/2028 school year, schools will be required to provide at least 60 minutes of core maths instruction daily for pupils in grades 4 and 5. The bill explicitly uses the phrase "procedural fluency" and calls for evidence-based instruction. That is remarkable in itself, because it means a US state government has effectively legislated that children must be fluent in maths procedures, not just conceptually aware of them.

Meanwhile in California, SB 1067 is pushing schools to screen early elementary pupils for maths difficulties, with multiplication fact fluency specifically highlighted. And in Texas, the new Bluebonnet maths curriculum is rolling out across dozens of districts this August, with teachers expressing concern about how to support the children who struggle most with its rigorous structure.

What unites all of these is a recognition that something went wrong when education swung hard toward conceptual maths and away from procedural fluency. US NAEP scores for 13-year-olds remain below pre-pandemic levels, and researchers are pointing out that older students are struggling with algebra partly because their foundational facts were never made automatic in primary school. The UK data on MTC scores is telling a similar story at a younger age.

The pedagogical debate is real and ongoing. Nobody sensible is arguing for a return to rote drilling in isolation. But the pendulum has swung back, and the consensus forming in both countries is that conceptual understanding and procedural fluency need each other. You cannot reason flexibly with numbers you have to laboriously calculate every time.

The growing "fluency without fear" movement in US classrooms is a direct response to this. Educators want children to be fast and accurate with number facts, but they want that speed to come from confidence and practice, not from the kind of anxiety that makes a child's mind go blank under a six-second timer.

Step back and look at the week's news together, and a clear picture forms. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are making times tables fluency a measurable, statutory priority. Regional attainment data is identifying exactly which schools and communities are falling furthest behind. And practitioners, parents, and policymakers are all converging on the same conclusion: drilling with timers does not build the kind of fluency children need, it mostly builds anxiety.

What actually works is regular, engaging, low-stakes practice that builds recall gradually over time, gives children a sense of progress, and does not make them dread maths before they have even reached secondary school.

That is precisely the gap XTables Champions was designed to fill. The platform is built around exactly this philosophy: building genuine times tables automaticity through play, without the timer pressure that the research increasingly shows is counterproductive. If you are a parent preparing a Year 4 child for the June 2026 MTC, or a teacher in one of those lower-performing regions looking for something that will genuinely move the needle over the coming year, it is worth exploring what a different kind of practice looks like. You can find out more at xtableschampions.com.