Maths was our tricky subject. I want to say that plainly, because there’s a misconception that home-educating parents must be academically confident across the board — and if you’re sitting with a maths lesson that isn’t working, feeling like the problem is you, I want you to know that you’re in good company. According to National Numeracy, 26% of parents worry about supporting their children with maths, and 20% say it causes tensions at home. Those are school parents. Home educators aren’t exempt from any of that.
In our case, the problem wasn’t the textbooks or the children’s willingness. It was me.
How we got here
A combination of bad teachers and exam stress had left me convinced I was inherently bad at maths. I’m not — I know that now — but the belief was real enough that it changed the atmosphere in the room every time we sat down to a maths lesson. Every other subject had a relaxed classroom. Maths had tension. The children could feel it. I was teaching competently enough, working through the textbook examples, getting the right answers, but I wasn’t doing it with any confidence. And that matters more than most people realise.
After one lesson (an embarrassingly simple one) where everyone ended up in tears, I accepted that this wasn’t going to work. I was eroding exactly the curiosity I was trying to build. Something had to change.
What we did instead
We outsourced it. Not the whole of their maths education, but the part that required a confident, calm maths teacher — which, at that point, wasn’t me.
We’d already been using How to Be Good at Maths as a curriculum framework, so switched to Maths Factor — a Carol Vorderman programme that’s since been retired by Pearson, which is a genuine shame — and the change was almost instantaneous. Carol Vorderman is a considerably better maths teacher than I am, and our children could work through the course largely independently. My role shifted from teacher to support — watching the tutorials alongside them when something hadn’t clicked, figuring it out together rather than being expected to already know.
From there they moved to IXL, and later to Khan Academy. I’m still in a support role for maths. That’s fine.
AI as the in-lesson backup
One thing that’s changed the maths dynamic significantly is AI. When a textbook example hasn’t landed and I’ve run out of ways to explain it differently, I can ask Claude or ChatGPT to generate another example and work through it step by step. And then another, if that one doesn’t land either. The textbook gives you one shot at an explanation. AI gives you as many as you need.
There’s still some stress in it for me — I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But the children know they’re not entirely dependent on me to understand the material, and that changes the dynamic in the room.
Tutors and past papers
If maths is a persistent struggle, a tutor is worth considering — not as an admission of failure but as a practical tool. A good tutor can identify gaps, build confidence in the basics before moving on, and work with your learner in a way that’s personalised to how they think. For UK-based online tutoring, MyTutor is well-structured and thoroughly vetted. Preply offers trial lessons before any commitment. For in-person, Superprof is a reliable starting point.
Past exam papers are also worth introducing earlier than you might think — not for exam pressure, but for familiarity. Working through papers at a comfortable level builds fluency and removes some of the format-anxiety when exams eventually matter. AQA, Revision Maths, and Save My Exams all have good banks of papers.
Where we are now
The irony is that years of supporting our children through maths, even from a support role rather than a teaching one, has made me more confident in the subject than I’ve ever been. I understand it better now than I did at school. That’s not nothing.
Maths lessons still don’t always go well. Some days the concept won’t click, or I don’t have the patience the moment needs, and the tension starts to creep back. On those days we call time. Protecting the parent-child relationship is more important than finishing the lesson. The lesson will still be there tomorrow.
If maths is your hard subject, the combination that’s worked for us is this: a structured online programme as the primary teacher, workbooks for practice, AI for in-lesson backup, and a tutor for the gaps. It’s not the approach I planned. It’s the one that actually worked.
There’s a list of books and additional resources we’ve found useful for maths linked here.
