Why Rote Drilling Failed the 2026 MTC | Times Tables Games

When I looked into what educators and researchers have been saying since the June results came in, one theme kept surfacing: the 6-second window does not just test whether a child knows their times tables. It tests whether they can retrieve that knowledge under acute time pressure, in a formal setting, in silence, on a screen. Those are four separate demands stacked on top of each other, and for many Year 4 pupils they are genuinely overwhelming.

Researchers and SEN specialists have been flagging this for a while now. The 6-second limit directly competes with the working memory load that anxious and neurodivergent learners are already carrying, leaving almost no cognitive space for actual recall. A child who genuinely knows that 7 x 8 = 56 can freeze completely the moment a timer appears on screen. That freeze is not ignorance. It is a stress response.

What stands out to me reading the emerging post-MTC commentary is that many schools prepared their pupils with exactly the kind of practice that mimics MTC conditions: timed drills, pressure-testing, rapid-fire question apps. The logic made sense on paper. But for anxious learners, repeated exposure to a stressful format does not desensitise them. It often reinforces the association between maths and panic.

This is the part I find most important for maths leads and class teachers to sit with before planning autumn term.

Rote memorisation, delivered through high-frequency timed drills, builds one very specific thing: the ability to retrieve a fact quickly when calm. It does not, on its own, build the kind of robust, flexible understanding that holds up under pressure. When a child hits a question they are slightly uncertain about and the clock is running, they need more than a memorised response. They need enough genuine number sense to reconstruct the answer if the rote memory fails.

For neurotypical pupils with low baseline anxiety, the gap between those two things is often small enough not to matter. For pupils with ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, or generalised anxiety, the gap can be enormous.

In our early conversations with primary schools, we keep hearing a version of the same story: teachers who spent months drilling their classes, saw good results in informal practice sessions, then watched certain pupils fall apart on the actual check day. The drilling built surface fluency. It did not build resilience.

Fluency is not the same as speed. Real mathematical fluency means a pupil understands relationships between numbers well enough to self-correct, reconstruct and adapt. A child who knows why 6 x 7 = 42, not just that it does, is far less likely to go blank under pressure because they have multiple routes to the same answer.

Building that kind of understanding takes a different approach to practice. It means spending time on patterns and connections, not just isolated fact retrieval. It means letting pupils experience genuine small wins that build confidence, rather than repeated exposure to failure conditions. And critically, it means separating the skill-building phase from the timed testing phase, so that the timer does not become the central emotional feature of all times tables learning.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, *"We built XTables Champions because we saw how quickly children decide they are 'bad at maths' the moment they feel timed and watched. That belief is the real obstacle, and it forms earlier than most people think."*

That observation matters a great deal for how you structure MTC preparation next year.

For schools with high proportions of SEN pupils, the post-2026 MTC picture deserves particular attention. Standard MTC accommodations exist, but they do not remove the fundamental pressure of the format. What does help is a preparation approach that builds genuine confidence and fluency well before any timed element is introduced.

From the schools we have been speaking with, the most effective approaches share a few things. They prioritise understanding over speed in the earlier stages of practice. They use low-stakes, engaging repetition rather than pass-or-fail drilling. And they pay attention to how a child feels about times tables practice, not just what score they get.

XTables Champions was designed with exactly this in mind. The approach is built around reducing the emotional charge around times tables by making the learning genuinely enjoyable and confidence-building first. The goal is for a pupil to arrive at MTC conditions already feeling competent, rather than arriving already braced for failure.

The schools that will see the biggest improvement in their 2027 MTC results are the ones that start differently this autumn. Not by drilling harder or earlier, but by building a foundation of real understanding and genuine confidence before any timed pressure is introduced.

If your school is reassessing its approach after this summer's data review, particularly if you are thinking specifically about your more anxious or neurodivergent pupils, I think there is a real opportunity to do something meaningfully different before next June.

If the 2026 MTC results left you wondering whether your current approach is serving all your pupils, I would genuinely love to hear from you. At XTables Champions, we work with primary schools to support times tables fluency in a way that takes maths anxiety seriously from the start, including for your SEN and neurodivergent learners.

If you are a Year 4 teacher, maths lead or headteacher thinking about how to approach MTC preparation differently for 2027, reach out to us at xtableschampions.com. Tell us what you are seeing with your pupils and let's talk about whether we can help.