"I can't do maths."
If you've ever said this - or even thought it - you're not alone. Research from National Numeracy found that four out of five UK adults have low functional maths skills. And if maths felt hard at school, the prospect of helping your own child with it can feel genuinely daunting, especially when the methods they're learning look nothing like the ones you remember.
Here's the good news: you don't need to be a mathematician to make a real difference to your child's maths development. The evidence is clear that what parents do at home - even small, simple things - has a measurable impact on how children learn and feel about numbers.
This guide covers what actually works, what to avoid, how to handle maths anxiety, and practical ideas for every year group from Reception to Year 6.
The single most important thing: your attitude
Before we get to practical strategies, there's one finding from the research that towers above everything else.
A study published in Psychological Science found that parents' maths anxiety is directly transmitted to their children - and it affects their achievement. When parents who are anxious about maths help with homework, their children learn less maths over the school year and develop more maths anxiety themselves.
The mechanism isn't mysterious. Children are extraordinarily sensitive to adults' emotional cues. If you tense up when fractions appear, or sigh when your child brings home a maths worksheet, they absorb the message: maths is hard, maths is unpleasant, maths is something to endure rather than enjoy.
This means the single highest-leverage thing you can do is monitor your own language and body language around maths. Swap "I was never any good at maths" for "Let's figure this out together." Replace "This is really hard" with "This is interesting - I'm going to have to think about it." You don't need to pretend maths is easy. You need to model the attitude that it's worth engaging with.
National Numeracy puts it well: being positive about maths is just as important as the maths itself. If you talk positively about how you use numbers in real life - budgeting, cooking, shopping, driving - your child absorbs the message that maths is useful, everywhere, and normal.
The evidence on what works at home
The EEF (Education Endowment Foundation) published specific guidance on supporting maths learning at home, drawing on their extensive evidence base. Their key findings:
Younger children benefit most from activities, games, and discussion. For children in Reception through Year 2, structured worksheets are less effective than embedding maths into everyday activities - counting, sorting, comparing, measuring, and playing games that involve numbers. The more natural and playful the maths feels, the more effectively children learn.
Create a daily routine. Consistency matters more than duration. The EEF recommends creating a daily routine for mathematical practice and reinforcing it with praise. This doesn't mean 30 minutes of worksheets. It means five minutes of times tables in the car, counting games over breakfast, or measuring ingredients while cooking. The predictability of the routine - maths happens every day, as a normal part of life - matters as much as the content.
Encourage your child to set goals and manage their own learning. The EEF found that supporting children's ability to regulate their own learning - helping them plan, monitor their effort, and reflect on what they've learned - is often more valuable than direct help with specific maths tasks. This means asking "What are you going to try first?" rather than immediately showing them how to do it, and "What did you find tricky?" rather than simply checking the answers.
Provide worked examples. When your child is stuck, showing them a completed example of a similar problem - with each step clearly explained - is more effective than either telling them the answer or leaving them to struggle alone. If you're not sure of the method their school uses, ask. Most primary schools now publish calculation policies on their websites, and many use the White Rose Maths scheme, which has free parent videos explaining each method.
Practical ideas by year group
Every year group has different expectations, but the underlying principle is the same: make maths part of daily life, keep it positive, and focus on understanding rather than just getting the right answer.
Reception and Year 1 (ages 4-6)
At this stage, maths should feel like play. Your child is learning to count reliably, recognise numbers, understand "more" and "less," and begin simple addition and subtraction.
What works: counting everything - stairs, shoes, grapes, cars in the car park. Playing board games that involve dice and counting (Snakes and Ladders is genuinely excellent maths education). Sorting objects by size, colour, or shape. Singing counting songs and nursery rhymes - "Five Little Ducks," "Ten Green Bottles." Looking for numbers in the environment - on doors, buses, clocks, price tags. Cooking together and talking about "more" and "less," "full" and "empty," "heavy" and "light."
What to avoid: workbooks, timed tests, or anything that feels like formal learning. At this age, the goal is to build a positive relationship with numbers, not to drill facts.
Years 2 and 3 (ages 6-8)
Your child is now learning times tables (starting with 2s, 5s, and 10s), doing more complex addition and subtraction, beginning to work with fractions, and learning about measurement, time, and money.
What works: practising times tables daily - but keeping it short and varied (songs, apps, car games, challenges against their own previous time). Using money when shopping - letting your child pay for small items, count change, compare prices. Telling the time together on analogue clocks (many children find this surprisingly difficult). Playing card games and dice games that involve mental arithmetic. Measuring things around the house - height, weight, length - and recording them.
What to avoid: teaching them "your" method if it conflicts with what school is teaching. The methods may look different (particularly for subtraction and long multiplication), but they're designed to build conceptual understanding, not just procedural speed. If you're unsure, ask the teacher or look up the school's calculation policy.
Years 4 and 5 (ages 8-10)
This is where the curriculum steps up significantly. Your child is expected to know all times tables up to 12 x 12 by the end of Year 4 (tested in the Multiplication Tables Check). They're working with larger numbers, fractions, decimals, perimeter and area, and beginning algebra-style thinking.
What works: daily times tables practice, focusing on the harder tables (6s, 7s, 8s, 9s, 12s) that the MTC tests most heavily. Try Bell.Study's free MTC practice tool. Real-world maths challenges: "If this recipe serves 4 and we need to serve 6, how do we adjust the ingredients?" Working with fractions during cooking (halves, quarters, thirds). Budget challenges: "You have £20 - plan a meal for the family." Encouraging your child to estimate before calculating, then check.
What to avoid: panic if your child finds the jump from Year 3 to Year 4 difficult - this is extremely common. The curriculum accelerates, and many children who were comfortable in lower KS2 find the pace challenging. Consistent, patient practice is more effective than intensive cramming.
Year 6 (ages 10-11)
SATs year. Your child is consolidating everything from KS2 and preparing for the end-of-key-stage assessments in May. The curriculum covers fractions, decimals, percentages, ratio, algebra, long division, multi-step problems, and data interpretation.
What works: practising with past SATs papers (freely available from GOV.UK from 2016 onwards). Start untimed, then introduce time pressure gradually as confidence builds. Focus on the areas where your child is weakest rather than revisiting topics they've already mastered. Teach exam technique: read the question carefully, underline key information, show all working, check answers. Keep a "maths journal" where your child records methods and key facts they want to remember.
What to avoid: making SATs the centre of family life. Your child is already under pressure at school. Home should be a place of support and encouragement, not additional stress. Short, focused practice sessions (15-20 minutes) are far more effective than marathon revision weekends.
Dealing with maths anxiety
Maths anxiety is real, it's common, and it can start surprisingly young. Research from the University of Cambridge found that initial signs of maths anxiety can emerge as early as age six, and once established, it tends to be self-reinforcing: anxiety leads to avoidance, avoidance leads to falling behind, falling behind leads to more anxiety.
Perhaps the most important finding from their research: 77% of children with high maths anxiety are normal to high achievers on curriculum tests. In other words, maths anxiety is not the same as being bad at maths. Many anxious children are perfectly capable - they just don't believe they are.
Signs to watch for: your child says "I'm rubbish at maths" or "I hate maths," they avoid or delay maths homework, they become upset or frustrated quickly when doing maths, they go blank on questions they could answer five minutes ago, or they complain of stomach aches or headaches before maths lessons.
What helps: normalise difficulty ("Everyone finds some maths hard - that's how you know you're learning"). Praise effort rather than ability ("You worked really hard on that" rather than "You're so clever"). Avoid timed tests if they cause distress - speed is not the same as understanding. Share your own experiences of finding things hard and persevering. Make maths low-stakes at home: games, puzzles, and cooking rather than worksheets and tests.
If your child's anxiety is severe or persistent, speak to their class teacher. Schools are increasingly aware of maths anxiety and many have strategies to support children who experience it.
When methods have changed: how to help without confusing
One of the most common frustrations parents report is that the methods their child is learning look completely different from the ones they learned at school. This is particularly true for column subtraction (many schools now use a "regrouping" or "exchanging" method rather than "borrowing"), long multiplication (the "grid method" before progressing to the formal column method), and division (chunking, then short division, then long division).
The methods may look unfamiliar, but they're pedagogically sound - they're designed to build understanding of what's actually happening in the calculation, not just procedural steps to memorise. A child who understands why they're exchanging a ten for ten ones in subtraction will be better equipped for more complex maths than one who mechanically "borrows" without understanding what that means.
If you're unsure what method your child is using, the simplest approach is to ask them to teach you. This has a double benefit: you learn the method, and the act of explaining it consolidates their own understanding. If their explanation is unclear, most schools publish their calculation policies online, and the White Rose Maths parent resources (freely available at whiteroseeducation.com) include step-by-step videos for every method.
Free resources worth knowing about
You don't need to spend money to support your child's maths at home. These are the best free resources available:
- Past SATs papers - every paper from 2016 to 2025, with mark schemes, freely downloadable from the Standards and Testing Agency on GOV.UK. The single most valuable revision resource for Year 6.
- White Rose Maths parent resources - free videos, workbooks, and guidance explaining the methods used in most UK primary schools. Available at whiteroseeducation.com.
- NRICH (nrich.maths.org) - thousands of free mathematical activities and challenges from the University of Cambridge, organised by age and topic. Excellent for children who enjoy mathematical thinking and problem-solving.
- BBC Bitesize - free curriculum-aligned content covering every primary maths topic, with videos, activities, and quizzes.
- White Rose One Minute Maths app - a free app for daily practice in bite-sized chunks, covering addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and subitising. Great for building fluency in 60-second bursts.
- National Numeracy's Family Maths Toolkit - free activities and ideas for bringing maths into daily life, designed specifically for parents. Available at nationalnumeracy.org.uk.
- Bell.Study's free practice tools - interactive MTC practice, SATs quizzes, and curriculum-aligned maths games. No account needed to start. Try them free
When extra support helps
For many children, parental support at home plus good classroom teaching is enough. But some children benefit from additional structured support - particularly children with specific learning gaps, children who've lost confidence, or children preparing for assessments.
The EEF's evidence shows that small-group tuition - a teacher working with two to five children - delivers an average of four months' additional progress per year in primary schools. That's remarkably close to the five months delivered by one-to-one tuition, at a fraction of the cost.
At Bell.Study, our live group maths lessons cover every topic in the KS1 and KS2 curriculum, from basic number skills through to Year 6 SATs preparation. Sessions are taught by qualified primary teachers with QTS, in small groups where your child gets personalised attention and the confidence-building benefits of learning alongside peers - all for £5 per lesson. Join our waitlist