Walk into many primary schools and you’ll find times tables practice happening daily. Songs, apps, rapid-fire tests and homework grids. The commitment is clear, but without the right teaching behind it, that practice rarely produces the results schools are working toward.
The desire to improve times tables knowledge is widespread. What’s less common is the teaching that makes that knowledge possible in the first place. There’s a difference between practising something and learning it.
Practice assumes a degree of understanding is already in place, that a pupil has encountered a concept, made sense of it, and is now consolidating it through repetition. When that understanding isn’t there, practice doesn’t build fluency, it creates gaps.
Practice without understanding isn’t enough
Teaching multiplication means helping pupils understand what multiplication is and why it works. It means building a consistent approach, using the same language and representations across year groups, so that pupils accumulate understanding rather than starting from scratch each September.
The heart of it is helping pupils see the relationships between facts. Times tables aren’t a list of isolated answers to memorise. They’re a connected system with patterns worth understanding. Knowing that 4 x 6 = 24 is a starting point. Understanding that 8 x 6 must be double that, or that 4 x 7 is just 4 more than 4 x 6, is what makes the tables useful. A pupil who can use what they know to work out what they don’t yet know is in a fundamentally different position from one who’s trying to hold 144 separate facts in their head.
The same principle applies to the patterns that run through each table. The 9 times table has properties pupils can investigate and rely on. The relationship between the 2, 4, and 8 times tables is worth making explicit. These aren’t shortcuts or tricks. They’re the structure of multiplication, and understanding them is what allows recall to be reliable rather than fragile.
When this kind of teaching is in place, practice becomes meaningful. Pupils are rehearsing something they have genuinely understood, which is when repetition produces the quick, accurate recall that the curriculum requires.
Why it matters beyond the check
The Multiplication Tables Check has rightly focused attention on times tables. But while the MTC measures whether pupils know their tables, it doesn’t measure how they got there. And the stakes extend well beyond the check itself.
Accurate, quick recall of multiplication facts underpins a significant proportion of the primary maths curriculum and beyond. Pupils working with fractions need it. Pupils calculating area need it. When pupils reach ratio, proportion, and algebra, those foundations need to be secure.
Where they aren’t, the difficulty pupils experience isn’t really about the new topic. It’s about the ground that was never securely laid.
What schools can do
The starting point is audit rather than acceleration. Before adding more practice time, it’s worth asking what teaching of multiplication is happening and whether it’s consistent across year groups.
Are pupils being helped to see the relationships between facts? Are they being given the language to talk about what they notice? Is there a shared approach that builds understanding from year to year, or are teachers working in isolation with different materials and different methods?
A consistent teaching framework, one that makes relationships explicit and builds understanding before rehearsal begins, will take schools further than additional practice time alone.
PiXL’s updated multiplication tables package gives schools the framework and resources to build exactly that approach across their whole school. Members can access it here.
