Effective One To One Maths Teaching: What We’ve Learnt From Delivering One Million Online Lessons

Here at Third Space Learning, we’re on a mission to help schools close the maths attainment gap. We started our journey in 2013 with just a handful of schools and one ambitious goal; to help make one to one maths support more accessible for schools.

We do this by connecting their pupils – the ones they believe need it most – to our dedicated team of specialist maths tutors, and taking them through a personalised learning programme designed to plug gaps, build confidence and boost progress.

Over the last 8 years our community of schools has grown and, on the 6th May 2021, we delivered our 1,000,000th one to one maths lesson to Jacob, a Year 6 pupil at Tendring Primary School, bringing our total impact to 86,976 pupils across 2,821 schools. The majority of the pupils we’ve supported are eligible for Free School Meals.

It’s been an incredible journey so far and, whilst our goal hasn’t changed, we’ve certainly learnt a thing or two about providing effective one to one maths support along the way! To mark this momentous milestone, we’ve spent some time reflecting on these lessons and what we see as the essential insights for any teacher or school leader looking to incorporate one to one maths teaching into their classrooms.

Developing the best possible programme of one to one support

With each of our lessons now having been delivered to thousands of pupils, we’ve had lots of opportunities to analyse and improve their effectiveness. Through this process of regular review, we’ve learnt a great deal about all the best ways to teach maths in a one to one environment, including…

1. The importance of an adaptive, personalised curriculum

With around 20,000 pupils currently taking part in our lessons each week, we know that it’s never going to be as simple as implementing a one-size-fits-all curriculum. Each of those 20,000 pupils has slightly different knowledge gaps, learns at a slightly different pace and has a slightly different attitude towards their learning.

We knew back in 2013 that we wanted to be able to identify these specific needs and personalise learning accordingly, and over the years we’ve been able to make our programmes even more targeted. The first step towards this hyper-targeted approach came with weaving assessment into the fabric of our interventions through the introduction of the ‘Diagnostic Programme’. This option automatically selects the most appropriate lessons for each pupil each week based on the results of their initial and ongoing assessments.

Our Senior Product Manager, Ellie McCann, tells us how ‘this diagnostic assessment allowed us to make our intervention more targeted to individual pupil needs and also saves time for the pupil’s teacher,’ as they no longer need to choose the specific lessons for each pupil each week – although this option is still available for those schools who know they have very particular topics to cover.

Having introduced the Diagnostic Programme, we then looked to how we could make this option even more effective for the schools who wanted this automatic gap-plugging approach. We broke each lesson down even further into distinct Learning Objectives (LOs), and ensured that each of the questions we ask in the assessments is clearly mapped to one of these individual LOs. This has enabled us to pinpoint – and fill – even more granular gaps in each pupil’s knowledge.

Read more: The Structure of a Third Space Learning KS2 lesson

“The personalised approach for children is fantastic, meeting individual needs and narrowing gaps. The children enjoy the lessons, make good progress and their skills are clearly transferred to class lessons. Thank you!” – Danielle Lewis, Senior Leadership Team, Highfield Primary School, Trafford

2. The importance of nurturing pupil mindset

As well as these unique gaps, every pupil will also have a different attitude towards maths and, over the past 8 years, we’ve seen first-hand just how much these attitudes impact each pupil’s experience. As part of our Global Tutoring Programme, we train our tutors to reward pupils who demonstrate effort and a willingness to give-it-a-go, not just those who reach the right answer. We do this through ‘effort points’ and effort-based stamps.

In more recent years, we’ve been able to incorporate this into the way we measure the success of our programmes and report impact back to the class teacher. As well as communicating the progress made by each pupil in academic terms, we also now report on how our programmes are impacting each pupil’s mindset, including changes in confidence levels and engagement as well as the value and enjoyment they get from their maths lessons. Collectively, these metrics are known as the Affective Domain.

Our Head of Academic Standards, Candida Crawford, describes how ‘we learnt that mindset is a different metric and we wanted to test this and show the results to teachers. We know that our intervention programmes help boost these skills as there is another person there; there is accountability as the pupil can’t hide, but also they feel confident and comfortable enough to learn. We wanted to be able to relay this clearly in our session reports.’

Read more: How to Measure Pupil Attitude and Mindset in Maths

“A number of pupil’s parents have told me how much their child enjoys the sessions and how they look forward to them every week! Teachers have also been saying how they have noticed a significant increase in the confidence levels of their pupils who do Third Space Learning – both in maths and in other subjects!” – Tim White, Assistant Headteacher, Morland Primary School

3. How to make learning easily digestible

Over time, we’ve seen that the best way to ensure a pupil has grasped the core skills of a topic is to adopt a ‘smaller steps’ approach. By breaking up our lessons into mastery units of smaller concepts, we’re now able to ensure that each pupil understands each one before they move onto the next. This idea of breaking lessons down into small steps has become key to our intervention structure and has allowed us to really think deeply about pedagogy and the mechanics of teaching a topic.

“The 1:1 sessions are perfect at aligning the small steps, gaps or misconceptions that need to be addressed to enable more confident learners and see rapid progress.” – Christine Spain, Headteacher, Stapleford Primary School, Cambridge

This approach has also helped us to combat one of the most common pitfalls for tutors and teachers when teaching maths, particularly to primary pupils; the curse of knowledge. Adults with a strong understanding of maths can sometimes internalise a lot of their key mathematical skills, not consciously thinking about how they know how to do basic maths because it has become automatic to them. This can sometimes hinder a teacher in their explanation of a maths concept as that level of understanding has not yet been developed by the child. Candida believes that one of the best solutions to the curse of knowledge is ‘atomisation’, explaining that ‘atomisation pulls apart and helps teachers understand what the components of teaching a concept are, helping them deliver the lesson better.’

“My tutor is very kind and explains things to me so I understand it and she never rushes when I am figuring something out!” – Third Space Learning pupil, Year 4, Kingston-Upon-Thames

4. The importance of flexibility

Ultimately, any intervention programme needs to fit with the requirements of the school and pupils in question. It’s essential for us that we build our programmes in a way that enables schools to use the intervention in a way that suits them best. Over time, we’ve been able to develop in this area, such as giving schools the opportunity to more easily reschedule sessions and introducing new options for lesson selection.

Over the last year, with schools facing disruption and changing requirements at every corner, flexibility has become more important than ever. We’ve worked to ensure as many pupils as possible have been able to continue their lessons during school closures, and have introduced new tracking systems to ensure lessons taking place from pupils’ homes go just as smoothly as they do in school.

“I have been with Third Space for a number of years now. I’ve got to say that I have seen the company improve year on year and this kind of flexibility has definitely improved since we first subscribed.” – Deputy Headteacher, Rochdale

Using technology to enhance the teaching experience

Technology has advanced at an astonishing rate over the past 8 years, and so too has our intervention programme evolved. Clearly, we’ve had to keep up with the rate at which technology is advancing, but we’ve also been able to harness the power of technology to make our intervention more effective and accessible for schools. This can largely be boiled down to three key areas; data, interface and automation…

1. Data: using what we know to improve what we do

With tens of thousands of pupils completing our lessons every week, and every lesson recorded for safeguarding purposes, we’re lucky to have a wealth of data to work with. Every month, we analyse our lessons with certain metrics, such as time spent on a lesson, pupil and tutor feedback and which questions are being answered incorrectly most often. From there, we conduct a qualitative dive into whether these are the result of a wider issue. We’re constantly looking at data to determine which lesson objectives pupils are taking longer to complete, feeding this back into our tutor training and curriculum design to improve our lessons.

For example, when we noticed that one of our Long Division lessons appeared to be particularly challenging for pupils – no matter their prior attainment – we were able to dive into the data to see how we could improve the lesson. We identified three areas that we felt we could improve to make a real difference to our pupils; differentiation, language, and visuals.

Firstly, we made changes to give the pupil the choice over which method they wanted to proceed with.

Next, we changed the lesson’s accompanying tutor notes to ensure tutors were using clear, simple language to help demystify this potentially confusing topic.

Finally, we updated the visuals of the lesson to help make it more digestible for pupils.

Read more: What We’ve Learnt From Teaching Our Long Division Lesson 2,968 Times

2. Interface: creating an effective and engaging learning environment

When we first set out on our mission to provide online one to one maths tuition, we used a third-party shared meeting service to deliver our lessons. However, we found that, because this was not geared towards pupils, we were missing opportunities to really engage our learners. So, in 2014 we built our own child-friendly online classroom that put the pupil front and centre with an interactive interface, engaging classroom tools and plenty of opportunities for praise and reward.

By observing how pupils interact with this new online classroom, we’ve been able to learn a great deal about what makes an effective online learning environment. Although it sounds counter-intuitive in the age of Zoom, we’ve found that by not having any video functionality, we’re able to minimise distractions for our pupils. We’ve aimed to strike a balance between building something that is engaging and fun for children to use, without creating anything that takes away from the ultimate purpose of the intervention: learning. Chief Technical Officer, Sam Stagg, tells us how ‘our purpose-built online classrooms facilitate a knowledgeable and empathetic tutor in helping their pupils build new connections with maths’.

This year, we’ve expanded our support to KS4 pupils through our new GCSE revision programme and it’s been interesting to see that older students also respond positively to audio and screen only communication, with many of our Year 10 and 11 students telling us that this approach helps them to feel more confident communicating with their tutor.

“There are actually a number of pupils who, when I see them around the school, will ALWAYS ask me if today is ‘their Third Space day’! We even have one pupil, a boy in Year 4, who recently said that Third Space Learning is ‘his favourite lesson of the week – even better than PE’ – rare praise from a Year 4 boy!” – Will Marsburg, Head of Online Learning, Morland Primary School

3. Automation: blending intelligent technological processes with the human approach

Over the years, we’ve been able to use automation to build a robust system that can diagnose gaps in a pupil’s maths learning and set out the most effective sequence of lessons to plug these gaps. However, the magic really happens when it’s not only individual gaps that are being diagnosed, but also the specific misconceptions a pupil has that’s causing this lack of understanding.

We’ve built our assessment in multiple choice format – with one correct answer and three carefully chosen detractors – to help us understand exactly why a pupil struggles with a particular topic. We’re then able to identify even more precise Learning Objectives to go through with each pupil to help plug these gaps and address these misconceptions.

“The tutoring sessions are having a really positive impact. We find that they really help the pupils to focus on resolving their specific misconceptions and they enjoy the interactive nature of the sessions.” – Headteacher, Northumberland

What we’ve learnt about training tutors to deliver high quality lessons

Tutors are undeniably a vital cog in the mechanics of the work we do at Third Space Learning, and so it is incredibly important to us that they are trained to the highest standard. Over the years, we’ve learnt a lot about the relationship between tutor and pupil…

1. The importance of empowering the tutor

Here at Third Space Learning, we take huge pride in our tutors and are committed to their ongoing professional development and helping them become the best tutors possible. In our experience, when you celebrate the success of a pupil with the tutor, the amount they appreciate the work they do increases massively. The tutor gains a sense of self worth when they can see that their pupil has achieved their goals as a direct result of their support.

Ultimately, the nucleus of what makes our intervention successful is the relationship between the pupil and their tutor – everything else we do is there to help that relationship blossom.

“Tutors respond to the children easily, forming good relationships and motivating the children to learn. The children all enjoy their sessions and are keen to attend. Progress last year in this group was above the average for the cohort.” – Jennifer Chaudhuri, Maths Leader, Westfield Primary School, Radstock

We encourage our tutors to take pride and ownership in the work they do with pupils, but we are always on hand to support; we ensure that all our tutors are pedagogically aware of what we were trying to achieve within each lesson, and each tutor is given a tutor guide for prep and delivery that can also be used in real-time within a lesson if needed.

“Communication with Third Space is excellent, the tutors work hard to engage the children and having the weekly reports is very useful.” – Abi Hann, Deputy Headteacher, Holy Trinity Primary School, London

2. A quality-driven tutor mindset

When we first began our journey, the tutor’s role was, essentially, to deliver the lesson to the pupil. However, we soon realised that this was a huge missed opportunity for getting the most out of each pupil and providing the best service possible to our schools. Achieving this is only possible if all tutors have a genuine passion to help their pupils. To help achieve this, we ensured our tutor recruitment and training didn’t describe the work our tutors do ‘as a job’, but something they do because they are also truly passionate about wanting to help individual pupils.

As Shiyamal Jayathilake, the managing director of our tutor centre in Sri Lanka, Third Space Global, puts it, ‘it became all about what we can do to help the individual pupil’. We’ve been able to achieve this through our rigorous application process and robust Global Tutoring Programme; a multi-stage recruitment and training process, resulting in only the most self-driven and passionate applicants being successful in their application. Since this shift in approach, we have seen a shift in the type of comments we receive from pupils relating to how our tutors have helped them grow in confidence and enjoy maths more.

Read more: The Secret To Effective In-School Tuition (The Quality And Training Of Your Tutors)

“The three years I spent at Third Space Global have been one of the most fulfilling experiences in my life.” – Achini Pahalawatte, Maths Tutor

3. The importance of community

For our tutors in Sri Lanka, Third Space Global has become a real community, and we’ve seen that this has had a huge impact on their motivation and passion to help our pupils. Shiyamal goes on to say, ‘if you feel that you are part of this organisation, you will translate this into the work you do,’ with Founder Tom Hooper adding, ‘we’ve learnt that the happiness of our tutors is fundamental to the pupils’ learning experience and their engagement with the intervention. We couldn’t have achieved our one million sessions without them and the brilliant work that is happening in Sri Lanka and India’.

“What I love about working at Third Space Global is that there is always something new to learn from the supportive workforce.” – Muhammed Nazeer, Senior Qualified Tutor

Our biggest takeaways

As we draw this reflection to a close, we’ve asked some of the Third Space Learning Team for their number one gobbets of advice for teachers looking to close the maths attainment gap in their classroom…

Tom Hooper, CEO and Founder of Third Space Learning: ‘Intervention is a small piece of a much bigger picture that includes the school, the teaching strategy, and how the teacher is leading their class. We’ve learnt that if we don’t fit into this holistic approach, then it will be hard to have an impact – we’ve tailored Third Space to be easy to use for teachers within their wider teaching strategy. For any schools looking to incorporate one to one teaching into their maths provision, it is essential that this complements the work being done in class and the wider maths strategy adopted by the school.’

Sam Stagg, Chief Technical Officer: ‘Micro rewards – such as effort points or the tutor sharing pictures of a pupil’s favourite football team or animal – are very encouraging to the pupils and boost their engagement in the intervention.’

Shiyamal Jayathilake, Managing Director of Third Space Global: ‘Celebrate the success of the pupil with the tutor or teacher.’

Candida Crawford, Head of Academic Standards: ‘Use stamps like ‘great explanation’ and ‘well tried’, to foster a growth mindset, and use quick assessment techniques in the classroom to start off lessons by assessing and understanding where pupils are at.’

Ellie McCann, Senior Product Manager: ‘Know the goal that you want your pupils to achieve and plan backwards from there. If your goal is for your pupils to hit the ready to progress criteria, then know what those requirements are and plan your lessons accordingly.’

We’d like to thank all of our schools, teachers, tutors and pupils for coming along on this journey with us. We know that the past year has been incredibly challenging for many, and yet we are constantly enamoured by the resilience of both pupils and teachers in continuing their maths learning.

We know the need for what we do is now greater than ever, with the maths attainment gap growing wider and wider. It will take years to close this gap, but at Third Space Learning, we believe we have the experience to be part of a solution to help tackle this problem. We are determined and committed to continuing this journey with you, and we can’t wait to see where our next one million lessons take us.