All twelve times tables need to be fast and automatic by the end of this year. Here's how to actually get there.
25 August 2026 · 5 min read
By the end of Year 4, schools in England expect children to know all their times tables up to 12 × 12, and most will sit the statutory Multiplication Tables Check (MTC) — an online, timed test of every fact — in June. It's a genuinely large amount to hold in fast, reliable memory, so it's worth being deliberate about how the last few tables get learned.
By Year 4, most children already have 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 10 solidly in place from earlier years. The real work is usually concentrated in 6, 7, 9, 11 and 12 — and even within those, it's often a handful of specific facts (6 × 7, 7 × 8, 9 × 6) that are genuinely slow, rather than the whole table being weak. Testing out of order is the only reliable way to find out which ones — reciting a table in sequence hides exactly the gaps you're trying to find.
The 11 times table (up to 11 × 9) is just the number repeated, so it's usually the fastest of the "new" ones to secure. The 9 times table has a well-known finger trick and a useful pattern (the digits of the answer always sum to 9), which can bridge the gap while pure recall is still building. 12s can be built from 10s plus 2s (12 × 7 = 10 × 7 + 2 × 7 = 70 + 14 = 84) — genuinely useful as a backup strategy, even though the target is eventually instant recall without needing to calculate it.
The MTC gives roughly 6 seconds per question, which means the goal genuinely is speed, not just eventual accuracy. Practising with a gentle time element — not stressfully, but enough to build the habit of answering quickly — better matches what the actual check asks for than untimed practice alone.
Spending a whole week purely on the 7 times table in isolation tends to produce a child who's excellent at 7s that week and has forgotten some of the 6s from the week before. Mixing several tables together in the same short session — even if it feels less thorough in the moment — tends to build more durable, genuinely mixed recall, which is exactly what the real check requires.
Five to ten minutes most days beats one long weekly session, for the same spacing reasons that apply to any memory-based skill — see why children forget maths they learned last year for more on why that spacing matters.
Grasp Maths tests every times table fact individually, out of sequence and against the clock, and tracks exactly which specific facts are still slow — so practice time goes to the handful of facts actually holding a child back, not the tables they've already secured.
Looking for printable practice too? See our Year 4 maths worksheets, or read the full Year 4 maths overview.
Try a free Grasp Maths practice session, matched to the Year 4 curriculum.