Until now, there had been no formal measure to judge whether children in England had learnt their times tables or not – with a formal judgement only somewhat made from a child’s Year 6 Maths SATs performance. So, the idea is for the Multiplication Tables Check to be taken towards the end of Year 4 to make sure children are meeting the benchmark of memorising their times tables up to 12 x 12 before moving up to Upper Key Stage 2 (Year 5 and Year 6).

All primary school-aged children are expected to know their times tables up to 12 x 12 by heart. In fact, they are expected to have mastered their times tables by the end of Year 4.

This was first announced by the Department for Education (DfE) in September 2017, the details of how the times tables test will be laid out was announced on Tuesday 13th November 2018.

The Multiplication Tables Check will be sat by a selection of schools in June 2019 with a full roll-out taking place in June 2020.

Aycliffe Drive Primary school volunteered to take part in the trial, depending on the confirmed pass mark for this trial our children will have achieved between a 78% – 83% pass mark.  8 of the children passed with full marks and 9 children only dropped one mark.

The tables test was timed, with the entire assessment lasting approximately 5 minutes in total. The children were given six seconds to answer each of the questions, with a three second blank gap between each question.