How to choose the right tool for the problem you actually have

There are a lot of free tools on this page and they do genuinely different jobs. Picking by what looks fun is how a child ends up playing a memory game for a month while the actual gap sits untouched. Here is how to work out which one you need.

Start with the symptom, not the tool

The three things worth doing most weeks

If you do nothing else from this page, these three cover most of what actually moves a grade:

• Five minutes of number fluency, daily. Times tables and mental arithmetic, short and frequent. Everything else runs faster when this is automatic.
• One honest diagnostic a term. A checklist or a readiness quiz, so the revision list comes from evidence rather than from a feeling.
• Convert every practice mark to a grade. Raw marks are meaningless on their own and they mislead in both directions.

What a free tool cannot do

Every tool here measures or drills. None of them teach a method from scratch, and that is the honest limit of the format.

If a diagnostic keeps returning the same weak topic, more drilling will not close it, because the gap is in the understanding rather than the practice. That is the point to go back to the topic properly. Our interactive mastery lessons start at the genuinely basic version of each topic and step up through difficulty tiers, which is the part a game cannot do.

Keeping it sustainable

The most common failure is not choosing the wrong tool. It is starting with forty minutes a day in September and doing nothing by October.

Short and frequent wins. Attach it to something that already happens, stop while the child still wants another go, and accept that consistency over a term beats intensity over a fortnight by a very large margin.

Questions parents ask

Where to go next