The multiplication tables check
Maths · Key Stage 2 · The School
What the check actually asks
In Year 4 in England every pupil takes a short on-screen multiplication tables check: 25 questions from the tables up to 12 × 12, with six seconds to answer each. Six seconds is the whole design. It is not testing whether you can work the answer out — it is testing whether you already know it.
Recall and calculation are different skills
Counting up in fours to reach 4 × 7 gets the right answer and still fails the check, because it takes longer than six seconds. Practice therefore has to be little and often rather than long and occasional: recall is built by repeated retrieval, not by understanding the idea again.
You know twice as many as you think
7 × 8 and 8 × 7 are the same fact, so the 144 facts in the grid are really 78. Take out the tables most people already have — 1, 2, 5, 10, and 11 up to 11 × 9 — and what is left is a surprisingly short list. Most pupils are fluent in the whole grid except roughly a dozen facts.
Find your dozen and drill those
Write out the facts you hesitated on, not the ones you knew. That list is usually 6 × 7, 7 × 8, 6 × 8, 7 × 9, 8 × 9, 12 × 7 and a few neighbours. Ten minutes a day on twelve facts beats an hour a week on all 144, because you spend the time where the hesitation actually is.
The two that come last, and why
Almost everyone ends up with the same short list of stragglers: 6 × 7, 7 × 8, 6 × 8 and 7 × 9. They are hard for a reason worth knowing — they sit furthest from any pattern. The 2s, 5s and 10s have rules you can hear; the 9s have the finger trick and the digits that add to nine; the squares have their own shape. These four have none of that, so there is nothing to fall back on and they must simply be known. Two of them are worth a mnemonic: 56 = 7 × 8 runs 5, 6, 7, 8 in order. Spending a week on four facts feels absurdly small and is exactly the right size of job.