Like having 13 teachers in the room, and the gap is closing

Times tables first: that's where the focus goes

Our SATs results sit around the national average, and if I had to name our biggest challenge in maths it would be times tables. I believe that if you can’t do your times tables, you can’t do maths – so that’s where a lot of our focus goes.

Our headteacher brought Third Space Learning in, she’d used it before when it was human tutoring. When I heard the tutoring was now AI, I was interested to see how much input we’d actually need to give.

Three groups of 13, and my input ends at log-on

I remember standing there in one of the first lessons thinking, “I’m not really needed here apart from getting them logged on” – and once they’re on, they’re fine.

I run three groups of 13 children for half an hour each. At the start of the year I printed little laminated cards with their logins. The first couple of weeks took a bit of input from me going round the room, but once they got into the swing of it, they just come in, log on, and that’s my input done.

Like having 13 teachers in the room

The biggest benefit is that it’s like having 13 teachers in the room. In my booster group I can only give one input and work with one child at a time, but Skye is tailored to each child – if they’re getting something wrong, it focuses more on exactly that. That’s personalised learning that we, as staff, simply can’t offer for every child.

We selected the children using a mix of Year 4 times-table results and Pupil Premium, so we were focusing support where it was needed most.

The children grasped the AI side really well. It works especially well for the ones with lower confidence – I told them at the start that it’s only embarrassing if you make it embarrassing, because everyone’s doing the same thing, everyone’s speaking to the computer.

The shyer children really got into it and built confidence. Back in January and February they were all completely focused in their sessions, there was classroom silence while they were in there with Skye.

The bottom group is catching the ones above

It’s met my expectations really well. It was sold to us as maths tutoring, and that’s exactly what it’s done. It’s definitely improved the children’s ability for what we need it for. I look at the reports each week to see how everyone’s getting on, and I track that alongside the formative assessments we do each term with the class teachers.

The impact has been clear. The children I’d have called the “bottom” group have gone from the lower-ability end to catching up with the children above them. I’m thinking of one little group of girls in particular: they’re not yet at the same level as the strongest in the class, but the gap is far smaller. It’s filling the gaps, exactly what we needed.

The easiest platform for the kids to use

If I were telling another teacher about it, the one thing I’d want them to know is the ease of use. Once the children are into it, it’s genuinely enjoyable for them as well as being learning. Even the way the questions are set out makes them easy to read and understand, and Skye is right there to help when they’re stuck. It’s the easiest platform for the kids to use.