Progress for every child: introducing Classroom Secrets Adaptive Maths

Progress for every child: introducing Classroom Secrets Adaptive Maths

No two maths lessons are quite the same. No two skills are quite the same. And no two children are quite the same.

A child who works confidently with place value may need additional modelling when learning about reflection. Another may understand a concept securely but need support with the vocabulary used to explain their reasoning. What pupils need can change from topic to topic, lesson to lesson, and even within the same lesson.

That is why our new maths resources are built around one aim:

Progress for every child, not just the average child.

Moving beyond fixed differentiation

For many years, differentiation was commonly understood as producing three (or more) versions of an activity for three perceived ability groups. This was an improvement on groups doing entirely different activities, as it meant children were working towards the same overarching objective, but it came with its own problems.

Although intended to help teachers meet different needs, 3-way differentiation can turn what should really be a temporary learning need into a fixed label. It can mean well-intentioned support becomes an unintended cap on ambition. Pupils may repeatedly receive less demanding work because they have been placed in a particular group, regardless of their knowledge of the concept being taught. The task being done as “working towards” can take over the lesson and mean those children never actually make it to “expected” and sometimes even miss out on reasoning and problem solving. It’s never done deliberately; it’s done because we all work so hard that there just isn’t always time to plan out a per-lesson knowledge organiser, or more scaffolded examples, or extra sheets we can use to pre-teach or for same-day interventions. This is why we’ve done all we can to take that workload off the shoulders of teachers, allowing them more time to do what they do best: teach!

We’ve built our new maths lessons on the back of years of research into what works best for children. The Education Endowment Foundation has highlighted the risks of permanent groupings and routinely producing three levels of task. Instead, adaptive teaching means responding to evidence about pupils’ learning and adjusting teaching while maintaining high expectations for everyone (Education Endowment Foundation [EEF], 2022).

Recent research in primary mathematics reaches a similar conclusion. Prast and Hickendorff (2023) found that fixed achievement groups are less responsive to pupils’ changing needs, which may differ considerably between mathematical topics. More flexible approaches allow teachers to decide, lesson by lesson, who needs additional instruction, a different representation or further challenge.

Our new resources are therefore not based on the idea that some children are permanently developing, expected or greater-depth children. We don’t believe a simple 'working towards' worksheet offers all the support needed for developing children, or that a one-page 'greater depth' sheet offers all the stretch that some children need. We do offer what we call Support, Core or Stretch pages for different learning needs, but we go beyond this, too. And these are teaching options, not pupil labels.

A connected, adaptive lesson journey

Each new Classroom Secrets maths lesson brings together teaching, practice, reasoning, support and challenge on one lesson page.

The teaching PowerPoint follows a clear sequence:

• Model: introduce and explain the mathematical concept.

• Practise together: work through examples and make pupils’ thinking visible.

• Your turn: give pupils an opportunity to apply what they have learned.

Throughout this process, teachers can check understanding and decide what pupils need next. The EEF describes checking for understanding as a central part of adaptive teaching, but the important step is acting on what pupils reveal. A teacher might remodel a process, address a misconception, introduce a prompt, remove a scaffold, or move the learning into deeper reasoning (EEF, 2026).

The resources then provide flexible routes through the lesson:

• Support offers additional structure where it is needed (as well as having more scaffolded examples and a knowledge organiser).

• Core provides purposeful practice and application.

• Stretch develops the concept through greater depth and challenge.

• Deeper Reasoning gives pupils opportunities to explain, justify, connect and generalise, going far beyond what other resource providers offer.

These resources do not have to be allocated to fixed groups. Support might be used for pre-teaching, a same-day intervention, a temporary group, additional vocabulary work, or a prompt available to the whole class. A scaffold can be introduced when necessary and withdrawn as understanding and independence develop. The EEF’s recent work on adaptive teaching similarly emphasises anticipating barriers, gathering evidence of learning and making responsive, in-the-moment adjustments (EEF, 2024).

Maintaining access to the same important mathematics

Adaptation should not mean quietly replacing the intended mathematics with something easier. It should help more pupils access the important concept while retaining appropriate ambition.

Carefully chosen representations can be particularly valuable here. The NCETM explains that representations should reveal the underlying mathematical structure and help pupils connect ideas, rather than simply decorate an activity. It also recommends planning for representations to be withdrawn when they are no longer needed (National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics [NCETM], 2024).

Reasoning is equally important. Mathematical thinking is not an additional activity reserved for pupils who finish in time. It involves describing relationships, explaining, conjecturing, generalising and justifying, and should run throughout the lesson. The NCETM argues that teachers should focus all pupils’ thinking on the essential mathematics being taught (NCETM, 2025).

Our new lesson structure is designed to support that balance: common mathematical goals, clear teaching and flexible responses to what pupils understand.

Adaptive resources, guided by teacher judgement

No resource can anticipate every need in every classroom, so teacher judgement will always matter. Standard resources often leave teachers to create the additional support themselves, while AI can produce more tailored materials but still requires careful checking for accuracy and pedagogical quality. Classroom Secrets Adaptive Maths removes as much of that extra work as possible, providing flexible options that have already been developed and reviewed by experienced education professionals. Teachers can then select and adapt what their pupils need, without having to create or verify everything from scratch.

References

Education Endowment Foundation. (2022, October 19). Moving from ‘differentiation’ to ‘adaptive teaching’.

Education Endowment Foundation. (2024, June 24). Five-a-day for pupils with SEND: A cluster of adaptive approaches.

Education Endowment Foundation. (2026, January 7). Adaptive teaching in practice: Using feedback to check understanding.

National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics. (2024, May 24). The Five Big Ideas at Primary: Representation and structure.

National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics. (2025, March 13). The Five Big Ideas at Primary: Mathematical thinking.

Prast, E. J., & Hickendorff, M. (2023). How do Dutch teachers implement differentiation in primary mathematics education? In N. McElvany, W. Bos, H. G. Holtappels, M. M. Gebauer, & F. Schwabe (Eds.), Effective teaching around the world: Theoretical, empirical, methodological and practical insights (pp. 757–774). Springer.