The power of Sparx Maths for you and your students
1. Personalisation
1 hour of personalised homework per week is proven to improve grades.
Sparx Maths creates an hour’s worth of perfectly tailored practice homework for each student each week driven by your scheme of learning.
The practice is both challenging (to ensure students need to think) and, crucially, achievable (so that students can be successful).
We also ensure the practice uses spaced repetition and interleaving to support a change in students’ long term memories.
We are proud that Sparx is inclusive and can adapt to all students’ current level of expertise. This promotes engagement, confidence and ultimately learning.
Dana Brown, Trust Maths Director, United Learning
"Sparx Maths has helped drive a culture within the school where homework is seen as positive - students know it’s good for them! Due to the way it’s designed, I trust that students are able to complete their homework properly and at a suitable level"
Chantel Rodas, Head of Maths, Rome International School
"The AI systems in Sparx Maths enable targeted meaningful work for all students with ease - this could not happen to the same quality with standard time pressures on teachers"
Maths Teacher
2. Content
Rigorously designed content to promote flow and intelligent practice.
The Sparx Content Design Team is made up of teachers, mathematicians, data scientists, graphic designers and grammar experts. The team has spent 10 years working with schools and using qualitative and quantitative data to carefully design a library of over 45,000 mathematical questions and 10,000 videos to ensure that:
Lindsey Skinner, Headteacher, St James School.
- genuine learning is promoted for all students;
- misconceptions are addressed;
- learners are carefully led step-by-step through every topic;
- links are built between topics where possible;
- and learners are prepared for their future.
Our content supports students ages 11-16 in the UK and internationally.
This wonderful library, combined with our personalisation systems, ensure Sparx can create a homework that is both challenging and achievable for all students every week.
Teachers love our content...
"Please could you pass my thanks to whoever came up with this question – it is questions like this that make Sparx Maths amazing – a really creative mixing of topics that challenge teachers to look at how they link ideas across the curriculum."
Rupert Greeves, Trust Maths Director, Education South West
"From other programs I’ve used, there’s nothing like Sparx Maths, in terms of the videos and the depth of the questions. It’s not just practising rules - it’s actually applying them, which I’ve found with a lot of online programs, it’ll just be going over basic rules, whereas this makes students really think and go in depth."
Chantel Rodas, Head of Maths, Rome International School
"The best part of Sparx Maths is the strength of the questions. The content has been well thought through, and asking the same question from multiple angles is really good for testing a student’s understanding of a skill. This allows students to keep extending their genuine knowledge. The Strengthen and Deepen questions for high attainers are brilliant!"
Richard Clayton, Maths Teacher, The West Exe School
3. Innovation
Pedagogical innovations to ensure that the quantity and quality of student practice is always being optimised.
Sparx always has and always will work closely with schools. Already we have invested in 10 years to research and development, working closely with our partner schools to build products that benefit both students and teachers.
Bookwork codes - A unique and clever bookwork check technology to ensure that students habitually write workings down to foster good practice and aid memory.
10,000 videos - Every question is accompanied with a short nudge video to unstick students so they are supported and don’t lose motivation.
100% completion target for all students - Empowered by our content and personalisation, which pitches homework appropriately for all students, we can set a fair expectation that all students complete 100% of their hour long compulsory homework every week. This clarity of mission empowers students, parents, teachers and schools to have the highest of expectations around home practice and promotes consistency across our schools.
In-built retrieval practice - Our systems create interleaved homework made up of topics from recent lessons and topics from further back to promote longer-term retrieval practice.
Dana Brown, Trust Maths Director, United Learning
"It would be physically impossible for me to provide homework as unique as what is being set in Sparx Maths in a time-manageable way. The fact that Sparx Maths is covering new content and consolidation content whilst also personalizing it for each student is a game-changer for me and my department. It really gives us the time and opportunity to support students in the areas that they are struggling with."
Emma Gore, Head of Maths, GEMs First Point Dubai
"The introduction of Sparx Maths has been a huge highlight. Encouraging the importance of students’ written work. We can already see the positive impact it is having. #Bookwork #LoveMaths"
Maths Department, The English College Maths, Dubai
4. Automation
To ensure students get consistently high-quality homeworks whilst saving teachers precious time.
We are fans of Behavioural Insights and believe that automation and strong default positions can embed consistently high-quality outcomes for students. Furthermore, these automations can save teachers up to 5 hours a week and improve teacher motivation and happiness. Examples of things we automate include:
- The weekly need for teachers to remember to set students homework. Instead your school creates your scheme of learning at the start of the year and the system can then design a homework for your students that you can review each week;
- The weekly marking of homeworks;
- The analysis of students’ and classes’ results over time;
- The creation of class-level insights to uncover material the students are struggling with or need extra challenge with;
- Keeping your class lists up-to-date through nightly syncing with your SIS/MIS;
- Weekly school/school group level reporting to headteachers;
- Parental communication to encourage parental support about their child’s homework.
"For the first time in 12 years, I have the confidence to increase my part-time teaching hours to (almost) full time. This is directly due to Sparx and the enormous time-saving nature of this fantastic product."
Philippa Stevens, Second in Department, St James School
"Sparx Maths’ scheduled setting of homework is fantastic as it gives a consistency across the school and lessens workload on teachers. I really appreciate this time-saving aspect but also that pupils can access differentiated content without this adding massively to my workload."
Head of Maths
"We were pleasantly surprised by the ease with which we set Sparx Maths up. The system features the ability to input your schemes of learning. This is great as it meant there were no gaps in what the students were learning and what they were being set in the system"
Emma Gore, Head of Maths, GEMS First Point Dubai
5. Collaboration
A supportive and collaborative approach with our schools, teachers, parents and students to ensure we make a positive and meaningful difference.
- We build our products by spending time with our schools and listening carefully to their needs.
- We invest heavily in supporting our schools getting the most value out of Sparx Maths through our School Success Team who are dedicated to supporting you and your school with implementation, on-going support and advice - we're here to help!
- We communicate with parents about students' homework to ensure parents are involved and can support the school and their child with the weekly homework expectation.
- We provide best practice sessions, school leader roundtable events, and many more opportunities for our community to get together and learn from each other’s best practice.
Laura Jacobs, Trust Maths Director, Ted Wragg Trust
Dana Brown, Trust Maths Director, United Learning
"The feedback from parents/carers regarding their weekly email has been amazing and has already improved pupils’ participation."
Sharon Sloan, Head of Maths, St Colmcille’s High School