Aim

Volunteers help primary school children who struggle with maths. Weekly fun one-to-one sessions help each child gain confidence and skills.

There is a huge need for additional support for young children who don’t “get maths”. Children who fall behind in primary school are extremely likely to continue to fall behind and then to fail their maths GCSE.  This greatly limits their educational opportunities and life chances.

We founded Number Champions to help primary school children who struggle with maths. Building on the successful model used by reading charities, we recruit and train volunteers to run fun one-to-one sessions with children selected by their teachers as needing additional support. The sessions use games and other creative activities to help the child gain interest, confidence, and skills in maths.

We now have some 135 volunteers supporting about 390 children in 42 London schools.

Annually we get evaluations from teachers on the impact of our scheme. Last July, 88% of teachers agreed (or strongly agreed) that the children were more confident in maths. The corresponding figure for “maths skilled have improved” was 84% and for “enjoyed more” was 86%.

Teachers also gave enthusiastic comments such as:

“[The child] has a newfound confidence in class maths lessons, now putting her hand up eager to answer questions and take part in whole class problem solving.” 

 “[The volunteer] was wonderful.  [The child] loved the sessions and always looked forward to them!”

The main skills we need from volunteers are to be able to interact well with young children and to be motivated to help them achieve their potential.  We will train and support you on the practicalities of helping the children with maths concepts. (At this stage the curriculum is predominanly about simple arithmetic to hundreds or thousands.)

You also need to be able to commit to weekly sessions in a local school during school time for a full school year.  (Although w accept that all volunteers will miss the occasional week for personal reasons.)

Working with small children is fun and rewarding!

 NOTE This site asks for only one postcode, but we partner 42 schools across London - so if you are interested please ask us if we have a school near you.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made