"Is my child where they should be in maths?" is the question every parent eventually asks, and the answer is rarely as simple as a year-group label. The UK National Curriculum sets out what schools are meant to teach in each year — but children develop at different speeds, and the curriculum itself is dense, sequenced, and easy to lose track of unless you're a teacher.
This is the simple version. What your child is meant to be doing each year, what tends to trip them up, and what to focus on at home if you want to help.
What they should master: Counting confidently to 20. Recognising the numerals 0–10. Understanding "one more" and "one less". Pattern-matching (which shape comes next). Subitising — seeing "three" without counting.
Where they get stuck: Reversing digits (writing "3" as a mirror image), and conflating "older / bigger" with numerical size. Don't worry about either — both resolve on their own.
At home: Count things together. Count steps, count grapes, count anything. Subitising develops by repeated low-pressure exposure, not by drill.
What they should master: Counting to 100. Reading and writing numbers up to 20. Number bonds to 10 (the pairs that make 10: 1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6, 5+5). Basic addition and subtraction within 20. Halves and quarters of small numbers.
Where they get stuck: Subtraction with crossing-the-ten — 14 - 8 is much harder than 14 - 4. Halves of odd numbers (half of 5 is 2 and a half, not "two-five").
At home: Drill number bonds to 10 until they're as automatic as their own name. Number bonds underpin every later mental-arithmetic shortcut.
What they should master: Place value (tens and ones). Addition and subtraction up to 100. The 2, 5, and 10 times tables. Halves and quarters of larger amounts. Money (recognising coins, making amounts up to £1). Telling the time to five-minute intervals.
Where they get stuck: Place value in subtraction — borrowing across the tens column. Times tables that are taught as chants without understanding (children who only know "2, 4, 6, 8" struggle when asked "6 × 2").
At home: Use real coins, not pictures. Time-telling on real clocks, not digital. End of Year 2 is the first SATs assessment in many schools.
What they should master: The 3, 4, and 8 times tables (on top of 2, 5, 10). Formal column addition and subtraction up to 1,000. Fractions of amounts (a quarter of 24). Telling the time to the minute. Right angles. Perimeter of simple shapes.
Where they get stuck: The 8 times table — it has no easy memory hook the way 5s and 10s do. Subtraction with two borrows (e.g. 503 - 167). Fractions when introduced abstractly rather than physically.
At home: The 8 times table is worth a dedicated week — every other year-group block of times tables leans on this one. Skip-count by 8s out loud while walking.
What they should master: All times tables up to 12 × 12. This is the year of the Multiplication Tables Check, taken in June. Formal multiplication of three-digit by one-digit numbers. Equivalent fractions. Decimals up to two places. Roman numerals up to 100.
Where they get stuck: The 6, 7, 8, 9, and 11 tables are the hard ones. The 12 table is often introduced last and rushed. Decimals are confusing when they first appear if place-value foundations from Year 2 are shaky.
At home: Times tables daily, every day, until June. There's no substitute and no shortcut. Five minutes a day for six months produces the recall a school cannot.
What they should master: Multiplying and dividing by 10, 100, 1,000 (and the decimal-place reasoning behind it). Long multiplication. Short division. Adding and subtracting fractions with the same denominator. Percentages of amounts. Angles (acute, obtuse, reflex). Reading line graphs.
Where they get stuck: Long multiplication when the layout slips. Percentages — many children memorise "10% means divide by 10" but can't generalise to 30%. Long division if introduced before short division is solid.
At home: If your child is doing 11+ in Year 6, this is the year their core maths needs to be solid. Year 5 is when the parent of an 11+ candidate notices the gap, not Year 6.
What they should master: Long division. Operations with fractions (adding, subtracting, multiplying). Ratio and proportion. Algebra (very basic — solving simple equations like 4x + 2 = 14). Reading and interpreting charts. The full KS2 SATs syllabus.
Where they get stuck: Ratio. Long division. Algebra when introduced abstractly. Mental-arithmetic speed under timed conditions.
At home: KS2 SATs are taken in May. Past papers — from Year 4 onwards — are widely available and the best preparation. The exam isn't about new material; it's about the speed and confidence with old material.
Don't drill above-grade content with a child who hasn't secured below-grade content. The pattern of "my child is in Year 4, let's get a Year 5 workbook" usually produces the opposite of the intended result: shaky Year 4 fundamentals masquerading as Year 5 progress.
The reverse is also true. A Year 4 child who isn't fluent with Year 2 number bonds isn't slow — they need to revisit Year 2 number bonds. Going back is faster than fighting through later content with a weak base.
The mental-maths-fluency rule of thumb: if a child can't reliably tell you 7 × 8 within two seconds, they should be drilling times tables every day. If they can, move on. Every later maths skill leans on this one.
Daily short practice is what builds fluency. Most apps in the primary maths space are built around this: a small number of questions, every day, adapting to what the child is finding hard. Arithmetix covers Reception through Year 6 with this model, on-device with no subscription. DoodleMaths covers similar ground via monthly subscription. White Rose Maths' workbooks are the paper equivalent and remain excellent.
What no app does well is replace conversation — a parent asking a child to explain what they just did, in their own words, while it's fresh. That two-minute step is the difference between fluency and just-clicking-buttons.
Talk to the teacher. Most primary teachers are happy to tell you precisely what concept the child is missing, and most are pleasantly surprised when a parent asks. Then drill that specific concept — not the year group's curriculum — for a couple of weeks. Children rarely have a generic "I'm bad at maths" problem; they almost always have a specific gap that, once filled, lets them re-join the curriculum without further intervention.