One fixed cost, four schools, and tutoring for every pupil on the intervention list

A disadvantage gap across the whole trust

Fairfax MAT is a trust of four schools, and three of them have 65% or more pupil premium, so closing the disadvantage gap is not an isolated issue for us. It is a trust-wide one.

Bournville, our most established school with Skye, is a relatively small school where 65% of pupils are disadvantaged. Many have English as an additional language, and pupils arrive from primary with an average points score of around 98 to 99, well below the national average. So we start behind, and the question that always follows is the one every leader will recognise: there are simply too many pupils who need help and not enough of you to go round. Whatever you put in place can feel like a small drop in the ocean, and there is only one of you.

One cost rather than a cost per child

We had looked at Third Space Learning’s human tutoring the year before. It was excellent, but at the numbers we needed, paying per session was simply too expensive. We could not give it to everyone who needed it. So when we saw the AI tutoring option, it was genuinely an exciting moment. For the first time, we thought: we can support lots of pupils at once, we can move pupils between year groups because it is one cost rather than a cost per child, and we are not piling work onto teachers to do it. Many of the pupils on our plan now would have had nothing under the old model.

Anyone who has used Third Space Learning’s resources and tutoring knows the thought and expertise that goes into them. Knowing experienced maths teachers had planned this content, and that it would pick up misconceptions properly, gave us the confidence to bring Skye into all four schools.

Three target groups from day one

Getting started was quick, and straight away we could target three groups at once. We emailed Third Space Learning to add our Year 11 pupils, selected the ones we wanted, and set a target grade for each one based on mock data. At Bournville we began with 15 Year 11 pupils, with one member of staff taking ownership of running it: five just below a grade 4, five who needed a push to a grade 5, and five aiming for a grade 7. They come in four mornings a week in form time, log on, put on their headsets, which is still a novelty, and crack on with their session. The alternative is running interventions every morning and trying to work out what 15 pupils each know, do not know, and need to be taught. Even a strong teacher cannot get anywhere near this impact on their own.

What makes it work is that all 15 pupils are in one room, all doing something completely different depending on what their pathway needs. Every Skye session opens with a diagnostic check-in question. A pupil who already has the skill moves straight down a pathway to independent practice, a challenge question and a check-out. A pupil who is less secure goes down a scaffolding pathway, where Skye models the question, uses a “follow me, your turn” approach for guided practice, and builds confidence step by step. The second a pupil gets something wrong, the teaching input is right there. In a normal lesson, a pupil with a misconception might wait 20 minutes for the teacher to reach them. With Skye, no one waits.

What struck me most walking round the sessions is that Skye never just says “that’s wrong” or “try again.” It starts by acknowledging what the pupil has got right and builds from there. I have heard it say things like, “you’ve correctly identified the tens column, lovely, now let’s look at writing your answer as a decimal.” That patient, step-by-step input is exactly what one teacher cannot give 15 pupils at once, and here it is happening for every one of them at the same time.

Is the gap actually closing? The early evidence says yes

The cohort on this programme is drawn from our disadvantaged pupils, the very pupils the attainment gap is about, so when their grades move, it is the gap itself narrowing. Across Year 11 at Bournville, pupil satisfaction is averaging 3.8 out of 5. Of the pupils who get their diagnostic wrong at the start of a session, meaning they cannot do that skill, 80% can correctly answer the check-out question by the end of the same 30 minutes. They move from “I can’t do this” to “I can” in half an hour.

On longer-term grade movement, of the 18 pupils on the programme for more than ten weeks, nine have improved their grade between the November and March mocks. We have raised our expected outcomes by a grade for 11 of those pupils, and one pupil has moved up two grades in the Progress section. Seven pupils previously expected to achieve a grade 3 are now on track for a grade 4, the standard pass, and because our predictions are deliberately conservative, I would expect that to rise. That grade 4 line is the one that matters most for the gap, because it is the threshold that decides whether a pupil leaves school with a pass in maths.

Beyond the numbers, there is confidence. Pupils come in every morning, do some maths, learn something new and carry that with them into the rest of the day. They will find their teacher in period three and say, “I did this this morning, I know what to do now.” For any maths teacher, a confident pupil makes progress almost by default.

Reporting that works across four schools

Sitting above four schools, the reporting is the part that makes it work at scale. Every piece of data – the check-in and check-out scores, the satisfaction ratings, the grade movement – Third Space Learning captures and assesses for us. We are not asking our teachers to build tracking spreadsheets, log every session, or work out the impact themselves. It is done, and it lands in one place. I can look across Bournville, Smith’s Wood and our other schools and see what is happening in each of them without asking anyone to produce a report. It frees our maths leads to spend their time teaching and responding to what the data shows, rather than compiling it. Across a trust our size, that time saving really adds up.

A closed system, checked as part of our data impact assessment

Because this is an AI product, safeguarding was our number one priority, and we looked at it very closely as part of our Data Impact Assessment. Skye is a closed AI system, so pupils’ voices, data and information are not floating around the wider internet, which was an important box to tick for us and for our DPO. Every session is recorded, and a red flag system alerts us to anything of concern, whether the pupil is using Skye in school or at home. One pupil tried to ask Skye its favourite film, then reported back, “Miss, Skye’s not responding to me.” It simply loops back to the maths. That reassured me that pupils would stay on task, and it helped me reassure parents that the more worrying aspects of AI are not present in this system.

Skye in all four schools

We now have Skye running in all four schools, and the fastest starts came from strong buy-in from Heads of Maths. Bournville and Smith’s Wood Academy in Solihull committed early, and both have a high proportion of disadvantaged pupils, so the benefit was very clear to them. Smith’s Wood has already scaled to a Year 10 morning session alongside Year 11. Where a school has faced logistical questions around rooms or devices, we are adapting the approach, including rolling Skye out for at-home use where parental buy-in is strong. My advice to any trust doing this at scale is to check the practical basics early: a member of staff who can supervise, which does not have to be a maths teacher, and access to the technology and a quiet space.

Stopping the gap opening in the first place

The most effective way to close a gap is to stop it opening in the first place. From September we will run Year 11, Year 10 and Year 7 in parallel at Bournville, and as an all-through school we have already extended Skye to a group of incoming Year 6 pupils. They logged on once and came out buzzing, because at that age the excitement of putting on a headset and doing maths on a screen is half the battle. From this week, ten Year 6 pupils start a structured intervention, an hour every single day, with a teaching assistant running two of those sessions a week. If we can close those primary maths gaps before pupils even arrive in secondary, we are not firefighting in Year 10 and Year 11 later on. Smith’s Wood recently had Ofsted ask specifically about closing gaps in foundational knowledge, so using Skye in Year 7 feels like a really important direction for the whole trust.

What changed everything is the cost model

Skye is a fixed annual cost, with unlimited pupils and unlimited sessions, so the question stops being “which children can we afford to help?” and becomes “which children need it?” We looked at what we were already spending on small-group intervention, on planning time, and on additional adult support, and the maths simply worked out better with a fixed annual cost. For roughly the same budget, we moved from supporting a small fixed cohort to supporting every pupil on our intervention list across four schools. If your bottleneck is that you cannot afford to scale, this is the model worth looking at.