For over twenty years, I’ve been on both sides of the same frustrated conversation in schools: “They got it yesterday… what happened?” Teachers leave lessons feeling buoyant often to find, the very next day, that the learning hasn’t stuck. Over time, this leads to quiet mutterings about colleagues in other year groups or key stages: “Did they even cover number bonds to 10? Multiplication facts? Converting fractions to percentages?”

It’s baffling. With all the effort going into arithmetic - mental starters, endless quizzes, daily drills - it feels like we should be seeing proportionally more confident, fluent mathematicians – an aim which is not always synonymous with improving measurable outcomes in SATs papers, or in PISA or TIMMS data. The refrain echoes around primary classrooms everywhere: “Remember this? We’ve done this! REMEMBER?” and secondary teachers can end up wondering what on earth happens in primary schools.

So, what’s going wrong?

The problem is we spend so much time focusing on whether children remember facts that we’re not giving them enough time and space to learn the underlying mathematical relationships that underpin the memory of those facts. This reduces maths to a memory game, and with so many similar sounding facts it requires herculean amounts of memory training. If they can’t recall a fact, we test it again. Maybe reword it. Then try again next week. And again. It becomes a cycle of “Do you know it yet? How about now? What about now?”.

To be clear, there is fantastic practice happening in many schools. Teachers model mental strategies, encourage talk, explore patterns, and build reasoning into fluency. This kind of intelligent practice - purposeful, connected, and thought-provoking - is where real learning happens.

But unless we prioritise these rich teaching approaches above constant low-stakes testing, we risk missing the point entirely. Fluency isn’t built through recall alone. It’s built through understanding, strategy, and meaningful connections.

As my former headteacher once reminded me when I was fretting about juggling the tensions of teaching Y6 maths; “You don’t only fatten a pig by weighing it. They have to be able to make sense of what’s in front of them even when their mind goes blank. Give them the tools to do that”.