Rebuilding number fluency after a disrupted year
A two-form entry primary used Mastering Number to close gaps in early number sense across Reception and Year 1, and found the change showed up in how children talked about maths.
Abacus NW Maths Hub · 27 August 2026 · Brambleside Primary School · Fieldway Learning Trust
Staff had noticed that children were arriving in Year 1 with unusually wide variation in number sense. Working with their local Maths Hub, the school committed to short daily sessions rather than a wholesale change to the maths curriculum.
The school's maths lead described the problem plainly: some children could subitise confidently to six, while others were still counting every object one by one. Whole-class teaching had become difficult, and adults were spending most of their time on the children furthest behind.
The Work Group's advice was to resist redesigning the curriculum and instead protect fifteen minutes a day. Sessions used consistent representations — tens frames, rekenreks, part-whole models — so that the same image meant the same thing in Reception as in Year 1.
The first sign of change was not in assessment data but in classroom talk. By the spring term, teachers reported that children were explaining their reasoning unprompted, and that discussion in lessons had become genuinely mathematical rather than a series of answers. One teacher noted that children had started to disagree with each other about strategies, and to justify why.
End-of-year assessment showed the gap between the lowest and highest attaining groups had narrowed, though the maths lead is careful about attributing that to one intervention alone. What she is confident about is that adults across the phase now share a vocabulary for what fluency actually means.
The children started disagreeing with each other about strategies — and explaining why. That's when we knew something had shifted.