Back to School Maths: How to Get Your Child Back on Track

Every September starts the same way. A child who was confidently doing column subtraction in June looks at one in September as if it were new. Nothing has gone wrong. They have had eight weeks off, and number facts fade faster than almost anything else children learn.

Researchers call it the summer slide, and maths loses more ground than reading, because reading tends to happen anyway over the holidays and arithmetic does not. The reassuring part is that it comes back far faster than it took to build. Two or three weeks of short, regular practice usually recovers a whole summer.

This is a guide to those first weeks: what to check, in what order, and how to do it without turning the kitchen table into a battlefield.

Start by finding out what actually faded

Resist the urge to go back to page one of last year's book. Most of last year is still in there. What you are looking for is the small number of things that have gone soft, so you can spend the time on those instead of on everything.

Fifteen minutes is usually enough, and it does not need to look like a test. Six or eight questions spread across last year's topics, asked over breakfast or in the car, will tell you most of what you need — as long as you watch how the answer is produced and not only whether it is right.

Number facts: recalled, or rebuilt from scratch?

Ask for 8 + 7 and 13 − 6. If the answer arrives in a second, the facts survived the summer. If you see fingers, lips moving, or a long pause, they are being rebuilt each time. That is the single most useful thing to restore in September, because every longer calculation sits on top of it.

Written methods: still there, or half remembered?

One column addition with carrying and one subtraction with borrowing will tell you quickly. The common September failure is not forgetting the method — it is remembering the steps without remembering why, which holds up right until the first question that looks unfamiliar.

Times tables: which ones went?

Very few children lose all of them. Usually the 2s, 5s and 10s are intact and the 6s, 7s and 8s have gone. Find out which ones specifically and you have turned "revise the tables" into three tables and a fortnight.

What to revisit, by school year

Going into ages 6 and 7

Counting forwards and backwards, number bonds to 10 and then 20, and recognising written numbers to 100. At this age the summer gap is mostly about confidence with numbers rather than lost content.

Going into ages 7 and 8

Addition and subtraction within 100, the beginnings of column methods, and the 2, 5 and 10 times tables. This is the year informal counting strategies stop scaling, so a shaky start compounds quickly.

Going into ages 8 and 9

Column addition and subtraction with regrouping, all the times tables, and the first real work with fractions. Subtraction across zeros — something like 400 − 137 — is the classic casualty of a long summer.

Going into ages 9, 10 and 11

Long multiplication and division, equivalent fractions, decimals and percentages, and multi-step word problems. Here the risk is less about facts and more about stamina: getting used again to problems that take more than one line.

The first two weeks

Week one is diagnosis and warm-up. Ten minutes a day, entirely on things your child can already do. This sounds like a wasted week and it is not — the point is to re-establish that maths is something they are good at before you go anywhere near a gap.

Week two is where you spend the time on whatever the check turned up. Still ten to fifteen minutes, still daily, but now aimed at one or two specific skills instead of a general review. One skill at a time, several days running, beats a different topic every day.

How to help without it becoming homework

September is already full. The practice that survives is the practice that is short, predictable, and not renegotiated every single day.

• Pick a fixed slot and keep it small. Ten minutes after snack, before screens. A fixed time removes the daily argument about when.
• Make the first week easy on purpose. A child who gets everything right for five days walks into the hard part willing to try.
• Ask how they worked it out — including when they are right. It is the fastest way to tell whether a correct answer came from knowing or from counting.
• Stop before it goes wrong, not after. Ending while it is still going well is what makes tomorrow's session possible.
• Do not re-teach the method you learned. If theirs looks strange to you, it is still the one their teacher will use. Ask them to show you how they do it.

Where to start on PetMat

Everything below is free to try, and none of it needs more than ten minutes at a time.

For a structured starting point, the learn hubs are organised by age and split into modules, so you can go straight to whatever your check turned up: maths for 7-year-olds, for 8, for 9 and for 10. Each module page lists its sub-topics in order, so you are not scrolling through a whole year to find one skill.

For the number facts themselves, the addition and subtraction exercise is the quickest way to see whether recall has come back — it keeps score, so two weeks of improvement is visible rather than guessed at. If times tables are the gap, the multiplication exercise does the same job for those, and telling the time is worth a few minutes if the clock went missing over the summer.

Maths games, for the child who has had enough of school

Some children come home in September wanting nothing that looks like a worksheet. The games practise the same recall with a score attached instead of a page.

• Number Catcher — quick mental arithmetic under a gentle clock, best for restoring number facts
• Snake Math — choosing the right answer among wrong ones, which is closer to how a test feels
• Memory and Word Search — calmer, for the days when nothing competitive will land
• 7 Differences — attention and visual scanning rather than arithmetic

The full set is on the games page. Ten minutes of a game your child chooses is worth more in the first fortnight than fifteen minutes of an exercise they resent.

Printable sheets for the kitchen table

Some of this is better on paper. Writing out a column subtraction is a different skill from tapping the answer, and it is the one school will actually ask for.

The free printable worksheets generate a fresh sheet with a full answer key, no account needed, at every age from 6 to 11 — including age 7, age 9 and age 10. One sheet a week, marked together rather than for them, is plenty alongside the shorter daily practice.

If addition and subtraction turn out to be the gap, our step-by-step guide for parents goes through the specific mistakes worth catching at each age.

What a realistic September looks like

Four short sessions a week: two online, one as a game, one on paper. Fifteen minutes at the very most. That is about an hour a week, and it is enough to close a summer gap well before the first term report.

What it is not enough for is fixing something that was already there in June. If your check turns up a problem that looks older than the summer — a method that was never understood, tables that were never secure — that is worth raising with the new teacher in the first few weeks rather than quietly trying to solve at home. September is the easiest moment all year to mention it.