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Every child asks the question at some point, usually while being drilled on the sevens. A phone will multiply anything. So why memorise it.
The answer has little to do with arithmetic speed, and everything to do with what a child can hold in their head at once.
1. Where the Gap Turns Up
Working memory holds about four things at a time in a child, fewer when they are tired or anxious. Every one of those slots spent working out 9 times 3 is a slot not spent on the actual problem.
Watch a Year 8 finding three fifths of 45. The student who knows their tables does 45 divided by 5, then 9 times 3, and writes 27. The student who does not stops to reconstruct 9 times 3 by counting up in nines, loses their place in the original question, and often ends up answering the wrong part of it. Both children understand fractions. Only one of them gets to demonstrate it.
That effect compounds, which is why tables tend to surface as a problem years after the moment anyone was tested on them.
| What the student is doing | What it quietly needs |
|---|---|
| Simplifying 2436 | Spotting that 12 goes into both |
| Factorising x² + 7x + 12 | Pairs of factors of 12, found in seconds |
| Long division and long multiplication | Every fact, retrieved mid-calculation without losing the column |
| Finding 15% of 240 | Tens and fives handled without stopping |
| Simplifying a ratio of 18:24 | The common factor, again |
None of these is a multiplication question. All of them stall without the facts.
2. Knowing Them and Working Them Out Are Different Things
This is the distinction the Year 4 multiplication tables check was built around. It has been statutory in England since 2022, sat online in June, 25 questions drawn from 2×2 to 12×12, with six seconds allowed per question and a three second gap between them.
Six seconds is short on purpose. It is enough to retrieve a fact and not enough to derive one, so a child who gets to 7×8 by going 7×4 and doubling will run out of time. The check reports a score out of 25 with no pass mark, and it plays no part in secondary admissions.
Plenty of children who appear to know their tables at home are deriving quietly. Sitting next to them while they answer is the only way to tell, and the tell is a pause of two or three seconds followed by a correct answer.
3. There Are Fewer Facts Than It Looks
The tables from 2 to 12 hold 121 facts, which sounds punishing. Most children already have the twos, fives and tens before anyone starts drilling. Because 7×8 and 8×7 are the same fact, half of what remains comes free.
What is left is a much smaller set, and it clusters in a predictable place. The 6, 7, 8, 9 and 12 tables account for nearly all the difficulty, and the check itself weights questions towards them. In most children the genuinely missing facts number a dozen or so, and 7×8, 6×8 and 7×9 are on almost everybody’s list.
Finding those twelve is worth more than another lap through the fours.
4. What Works, and What Wastes the Effort
Chanting a table in order builds a sequence rather than a set of facts, and the sequence becomes a crutch. A child who can only reach 8×7 by running up from 8×1 has memorised a song. Ask for the facts in random order.
Ask in both directions too. A child who knows 7×8 and cannot answer 56 divided by 7 has half the fact, and division is where it will be needed.
Little and often beats a long session. Five minutes a day for a fortnight will do more than an hour on a Sunday, because recall is built by retrieval rather than by exposure.
Aim at the missing facts. Most practice ends up spread evenly across everything, which means most of the time goes on facts the child already had.
For an older child who has arrived in secondary school without them, the work is the same and the framing has to change. Nobody wants to be seen doing Year 4 material at 13. Short private sessions, described as speed work, tend to get further than anything with a primary school label on it.
5. Where to Start
Ivy Maths Skill Practice covers multiplication facts in mixed order and both directions, which is the format that builds recall rather than sequence. It shows which facts are actually missing, so the practice narrows to those instead of running over everything.
Set it as Daily Practice for five or ten minutes. Two weeks of that shifts more than most families expect, and for a child heading towards the check in June, starting in the autumn term is worth more than anything done in May.