From 59 pupils to 182 across Years 4 to 6, built into every maths lesson

Closing the in-school gap, a fraction of pupils at a time

We’re at around 36% pupil premium at the moment, and up to 40% of our children have been in receipt of the grant. We’ve got a heavy overlap between pupil premium and SEND, and closing the in-school attainment gap has been a core focus in our development plan for years.

Third Space Learning’s human tutoring was an expensive route when you took into account how many pupils needed it, so we had to carefully target pupil premium pupils from Year 4 to Year 6, plus a few SEND pupils. Over time, we’d invested up to £60,000 with Third Space, our biggest tutoring spend. We were an NTP flagship school and used all three routes when the 60% subsidy was available.

But even with that spend, we could only reach a fraction of our children, and every live session had to be pre-booked around a single tutor.

Escaping the rationing trap

We’ve gone from supporting around 59 pupils under the old model to 182 now, for about a tenth of the price we used to pay. It means the tutoring is now accessible to all the children we want to reach, pitched to where each child actually is, rather than rationed to the ones we could afford.

It’s a real saving I can justify to my governors, and in a school like ours, every penny counts. And there’s no more variable tutor quality, or language and connection barriers – it’s the same AI tutor for every child, every session.

A rotation model inside every maths lesson

Skye is woven into every maths lesson across Years 4 to 6, not a separate slot before school. Classes are split into groups that rotate: one group works directly with the teacher in a focused, fairly homogeneous group; one group works with Skye; and one group completes other maths work. The whole class is never on Skye at once. Some children have more than one session a week, depending on need.

This also means teachers are focused on smaller groups, and every pupil gets that focus time every week, from those working towards the expected standard through to greater depth. The rotation frees the teacher up to do really targeted teaching with a small group while Skye supports another, so the quality of every group goes up.

In our model the class teacher is in the room throughout but not directly delivering to the Skye group. We can glance across and see very quickly how each child is doing. A learning walk with Tom, the CEO of Third Space, helped me refine how the room runs, and my younger, tech-confident teachers manage the platform comfortably as part of the normal lesson.

Talking out loud: the oracy advantage

Oracy is a real driver for us. Talking to Skye makes the children articulate their reasoning out loud and use the correct mathematical vocabulary, rather than waiting for me to step in. It builds independence, resilience and stamina, and moves them away from the ‘the teacher will come to my aid’ mindset.

The way lessons with Skye are built mirrors our ‘I do, we do, you do’ pedagogy, and my own ‘extended redo’ approach, where the children work through a couple of examples until they feel successful.

Personalised to every child, including SEND pupils

Every Skye session starts with a diagnostic check-in, and the lesson branches from there, so every pupil in the room has a lesson built around what they actually need. I use the diagnostic to place every child on the right programme, including SEND pupils. Right now that’s fractions, calculations and place value, with newer programmes coming on stream.

We already run Skye across Years 4 to 6. Year 4 is the entry to our upper school and a natural place to introduce it, and starting earlier means we catch gaps well before Year 6. We fit it in without asking the younger children to come in early – the rotation model inside the daily maths lesson is what makes that possible.

Delivery that follows the child

The flexibility is huge for us. A live tutor session used to have to be pre-booked, and if a child was away or the connection failed, it was lost.

Now the groups are flexible. We move children between groups as they make progress, so the delivery follows the child rather than a fixed booking. And the children work at their own pace, which takes away the frustration of being timed out or left behind.

Safeguarding and parental trust

Bringing AI into a primary setting, we’ve built this into our policies quite formally. We’ve uploaded privacy notices to our website as a statutory duty, so parents are informed, and we’ve added an AI section to our computing policy, reviewed by our computing lead and the safeguarding team. Skye is a closed system, every session is recorded, and there’s a red-flag monitoring system that picks up anything of concern.

The session transcripts are really valuable – if anything is ever misinterpreted, we can check the record.

Is the gap closing? The evidence

This year Skye has supported 182 of our pupils across Years 4 to 6, with 4,797 sessions and 8,362 learning objectives taught. 80% of our pupils were secure in their understanding by the end of each session, 87% of lessons ended with maintained or improved confidence, and our average pupil survey score is 3.7 out of 5.

Our own NFER tests back that up: Year 5 maths attainment was around 73%, with our pupil premium group at around 70%, a narrow in-school gap. I’d still say quality-first teaching is the number-one driver, though. Skye is a strong supplement to it, not a replacement.

We also get fantastic, detailed reports, and the key thing is we’re not the ones having to produce them. This year alone it saved us around 3,598 hours of teacher time, the equivalent of nearly three extra members of staff. That frees my teachers up to act on what the data is telling them rather than spend their evenings compiling it.