For tutors
Stop setting the whole group the same homework.
Next year’s students come from this year’s results. That is the whole of a tutor’s marketing, and it is decided by what each child can still do on the morning of the exam — not by what they understood in the lesson.
And between the lesson and that morning, you are flying blind. No two children take the same thing from the same hour. One leaves secure on equivalent fractions and shaky on fractions of an amount. Another has both on the day and has lost one of them six weeks later.
So the homework goes out broadly the same to everybody, because there is no way to tell them apart. That is not a teaching problem. It is a measuring problem — and measuring it is not something a lesson can be spent on.
What it looks like when you can tell them apart
You teach fractions. Each child sits the topic paper in their own time. Before the next lesson you know:
| Amir | takes the fraction of what is left, not of the original amount — three times out of three |
| Sophie | equivalent fractions. Fine when it is asked plainly, gone when it is buried in a sentence |
| Daniel | secure throughout. Move him on — there is nothing here worth an hour |
Three different pieces of homework instead of one, and an hour of Daniel’s tuition spent on something he actually needs. Knowing what to leave alone is worth as much as knowing what to fix.
Why it cannot be your job
There is a curriculum to get through
An hour spent revisiting October is an hour not spent on what comes next, and the exam does not move.
Re-teaching a topic to find two gaps is expensive
Most of what you cover will already be secure. You would spend a full hour to locate ten minutes of problem.
The child resists it
“We’ve already done this.” A child who thinks a topic is finished gives you a worse hour than the first one.
And the parent notices
If a topic keeps reappearing, they wonder why they are paying for it twice. That is not an unfair thought.
And even then, it does not find the gap
To know a child can do one part and not another, those parts have to be tested separately — and you have to know in advance which ones to test.
How it reaches you
There is no tutor login, and you administer nothing. Each family has their own account and sets it up themselves. What reaches you is one page per child, handed over by the parent — so the picture above is one you build from three pages, not a screen we give you.
The child sits one paper on one topic, on screen, in their own time. Every skill in it is asked more than once, in a different form each time — because one wrong answer is an incident, and the same one repeated is a habit.
You get one page: what is secure, what has gone, and the specific mistake behind each thing that went. The pattern tells you which lesson to give:
- They cannot do it yet. That is a teaching job.
- They can do the maths but do not spot when it is wanted. That is a different lesson entirely, and it is not more practice.
- They know it, and they are rushing. That is a third thing again.
Those three children look identical on a score, and each needs a different hour from you.
And it keeps asking
A skill that has gone right comes back for a quiet check after a week. If it holds, a month. Then three months, then six. So a thing that faded in November surfaces in December — not in a mock next summer, when it looks like a new problem instead of an old one.
Talk to us
If this is the thing your lessons have been missing, tell us how you work — how many students, which exams, and what would actually be useful on that one page. A person reads every note, and it shapes what gets built next.
Families come to SillyMaths themselves, one child at a time — the first topic paper is free to them, with no card. If you would rather point a parent at it than set anything up yourself, send them to how it works.