Why don’t times tables stick?

By this point, it is memory rather than maths

Most children meet multiplication as an idea long before they are asked to recall it at speed. They can work out four sixes with counters, or by adding, or by drawing rows. What changes later is the demand: not can you work it out but do you already know.

Similar facts get in each other’s way

Six sevens, six eights and seven eights share their digits — and facts that look alike, learned close together, compete in memory and come back less reliably.

A 2022 study trained children on four facts a week for four weeks. In the weeks where the four facts were deliberately dissimilar, learning was measurably better than in the weeks where they resembled each other — and the advantage was still there seven weeks later.

Practising the whole six times table in one sitting is close to the worst arrangement you could pick.

Most of the table is easier than the rest

Tens, fives and twos have patterns a child can see. Ones and zeros are rules rather than facts. Elevens and twelves lean on tens. Once you take those away, what is left is a small awkward core — mostly the sixes, sevens and eights — with no visible pattern to fall back on.

So a child who “knows most of them” may know all the patterned ones and almost none of the hard ones.

Seven eights and eight sevens may not feel like one fact

To an adult they are obviously the same. To a child who has not properly absorbed that, they are two separate things to remember — which quietly doubles the size of the job.

Being timed can make recall worse

Recall needs a certain amount of quiet mental space. Pressure competes for that same space, so a child who is being timed often falls back on counting, which is slower, which increases the pressure. Speed is a reasonable thing to want eventually. As a way of getting there it can work against itself.