We never hear anyone say "I am just not a reading person", yet without question we routinely accept it when students say "I am just not a maths person". As adults, we say "I was never good at maths" in front of children, and they hear it as permission to stop trying.
A good maths education should be available to every child, and that is one of the most powerful things a trust can give. Not because maths is more important than anything else, but because of what it facilitates.
Maths results decide which post-16 routes open, which apprenticeships and degrees are reachable, and which adults later feel able to argue with a payslip, a tenancy agreement or a government statistic. When maths attainment tracks family income, so does a good deal of what follows.
The disadvantage gap at 16 is still wider than before the pandemic, albeit narrowing slightly. More striking, 44 per cent of the GCSE disadvantage gap already exists at age 11. Children arrive in Year 7 with much of the distance already travelled, and in maths the divergence begins before school does.
Available to all is not the same as identical for all
"Maths for all" sounds as though it should mean every child in the same room doing the same work. But identical provision is not equity. It is a tidier way of deciding in advance who will keep up.
What every child needs is not the same lesson. It is the same destination, and our teachers need the freedom to find the route.
That points to a division of labour only trusts can strike. The trust safeguards what must not drift: the curriculum - its sequence and the assessment that says honestly whether a child has understood. Those are the guarantees, and they belong to the trust: they are what makes a child's education continuous rather than a series of restarts.
The teacher in front of thirty children on a Tuesday morning knows what no central team can: which child nodded without understanding, what has to be gone back over before anything else can be built on it. Adapting is not a deviation from the curriculum. It is how the curriculum reaches a particular child.
Trusts get into difficulty when they invert this, standardising the lesson while leaving the curriculum's meaning vague. Everyone teaches the same slides in the same week, and still nobody can say what "secure” really means. That is uniformity where we needed guarantees,
and constraint where we needed judgement.
So the equity question is not whether every child gets the same lesson. It is whether every child gets the same promise - and whether the adult in the room has the freedom, and the information, to keep it.
Why the answer has to be trust-wide
That balance is hard for one school to sustain across a child's whole education. Maths is the most vertically sequenced subject in the curriculum. A child who never securely grasped equivalence in Year 4 does not find fractions harder in Year 8 - she finds them closed. The
nine-year-old who decides she is not a maths person is usually meeting the delayed consequence of something left unfinished years earlier, quite possibly in another school in the same trust.
Only a trust can make that one journey: a single line of sight from Reception to Year 11, rather than a primary project and a secondary project meeting termly across the seam where children lose most ground.
Scale offers something else. One school trying something new produces an anecdote - we have run small trials ourselves and found them easier to feel good about than to learn from. A dozen schools running the same approach, honest about where its success lies, produces knowledge. Trusts are large enough to generate their own evidence rather than only consume other people's, including ours. Very few do.
We work with trusts on maths, so our interest in this is plain. But every question above can be acted on with the people a trust already employs: one person accountable for maths across all eleven years, given authority rather than a title, and agreement about meaning rather than materials.
Children who decide they are not maths people are telling us what we taught them. That is a hard thing to hear and a hopeful one, because it means it is ours to change.
- Jack Finnerty is Strategic Account Manager at Magma Maths. Magma Maths is a sponsor of CST's 2026 Annual Conference.
We welcome perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
