Rachel Dunlop

Rachel teaches primary maths across key stage 1 and key stage 2, with most of her week given to years 4, 5 and 6. Times tables come up in nearly every lesson, though rarely as a timed test. She would rather a pupil build 7 × 8 with counters on the table, explain it back to her, and then meet the same fact again a fortnight later than race a stopwatch and freeze.

Lessons usually open with something the pupil can already do, because that is the quickest way to settle a nervous start. From there she works in short blocks: place value and number lines first, then the written methods, then a word problem that sounds like real life, usually a recipe, a bus timetable or a trip to the shop. Parents get a progress report that names what has shifted and what is still wobbly, in plain words rather than levels.

She writes most of our year 4 to 6 plans, and she is the person who will happily redo a worksheet on a Thursday evening if a pupil has come home from school saying the homework made no sense. Her view is simple. Confidence in maths is mostly a memory of things going right.