The question they didn’t start

Every marking scheme in the country treats a blank and a wrong answer the same way. No mark either way, and the total does not care which it was.

For the exam that is correct. For deciding what to do next it throws away the most useful thing on the page.

Two blanks that mean opposite things

A child leaves question 35 empty and hands the paper in at the bell, having answered everything up to 34. That blank is a clock.

A different child leaves question 35 empty, answers 36 to 40, and finishes with time to spare. That blank is not a clock and it is not a gap. They looked at it and decided not to start.

We watched this happen. A boy sat a mock and skipped a question about furlongs and chains — converting between three units nobody uses any more. He had plenty of time. He could do the maths; he had done harder conversions earlier in the same paper. It just looked like a lot of effort for one mark, and he moved on.

The person who spotted it recognised it immediately, because he had skipped the same question himself when he sat the paper.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Almost everything a maths product does assumes a wrong answer means "cannot do it yet". That assumption is right most of the time and it is the foundation of a diagnostic.

A won't-start breaks it. The child can do it. The mark is gone anyway. And every fix built for "cannot do it" — more explanation, a worked example, a video — is aimed at a problem that is not there. You can teach someone who cannot. You cannot teach someone who did not begin.

There is a second reason it is worth separating. A child who leaves four questions blank reads, on ordinary marking, as four wrong answers on four different skills — four findings about their maths, most of which never happened. So a blank is recorded here as a blank, and counted as one.

What the paper can honestly show you

Not what a child felt. We do not know, we have no way to know, and any product claiming otherwise from a set of marks is guessing.

What is on the record is narrower and more useful:

• whether it was blank, or answered and wrong — those are different findings
• how long they spent on it before moving on — three seconds and ninety seconds are not the same decision
• whether they got a harder version of the same thing right earlier — which settles whether they could do it
• whether the clock had run out — a question the timer cut off is not recorded as an attempt at all

Put those together and a blank stops being a mystery. A question left after ninety seconds, on a skill they got right twice earlier, with time still on the clock, is not a maths finding. It is a starting problem.

What actually helps

A first rung so gentle they have begun before they have decided not to.

That is the whole idea, and it is why the answer to a won't-start is not a harder push. Take the same skill and find the easiest question anybody owns on it — genuinely easy, easier than feels sensible — then the next one up, then the next. The furlongs question is, structurally, the same question as "find the total of 4 m, 7 cm and 2 mm in millimetres": three units, combine into the smallest one. A child who has just done that one in units they know is a different child by the time the strange names arrive.

They are not being talked into it. They have already done it once.

What we deliberately do not say

You will not find us telling you your child is anxious, or confident, or that they need reassuring. We see marks and seconds. From those you cannot tell nerves from boredom, and a product that guesses at your child's state of mind from a mark sheet is making something up.

What we can say is which question was left, whether they could have done it, and how long they looked at it first. That is a smaller claim. It is also one you can check for yourself, and act on.