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As of 12 August 2026, AI can only partly teach your kid maths.
Most people should do this themselves; the prompt is on this page.
Can you do it?
2 minutesto a draft.
30 minutesto something you’d act on.
Cost, all in£0
Skill needednone
Who has to check ityou
What the alternative costsA private maths tutor commonly charges £25 to £45 an hour.
If this goes wrong: a confidently wrong worked example or an unfamiliar method takes root, and the confusion surfaces weeks later in class as the child's failure rather than the tool's.
What to actually do
Do it yourself
The route this page recommends
A chat interface, no skill needed, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.
Prompt
My child is working on fractions of amounts, around year 5 of the English national curriculum. Give me five practice questions ordered easier to harder with worked answers I can check myself, one everyday explanation of the idea using food or money, and the question I should ask my child to find where the confusion actually starts. Keep the method consistent with how UK primary schools teach it, and say when you are not sure it is.
Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.
Use a tool built for this
Second choicePurpose-built software does the mechanical share of this.
Khan Academy
Free
Free, structured practice with instant marking and mastery tracking: the follow-through a chat session does not have, and the child can use it alone.
Hand it to a person
The distant thirdA person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.
What it gets wrong
- Its arithmetic in worked examples is occasionally, confidently wrong, and a parent checking at speed inherits the error.
- It defaults to methods schools no longer teach, and a child shown two competing methods mid-topic often ends up with neither.
- It cannot see the face across the table: motivation, frustration and the moment a child stops listening are the actual teaching problem, and they are yours.
What caps this at PARTLY: relationship and context depth.
How we scored this
Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.
| Axis | Score (0–2) |
|---|---|
| Output | 1 |
| Inputs | 2 |
| Verification | 1 |
| Liability | 1 |
| Effort delta | 2 |
| Total | 7 / 10 |
The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.
FAQ
- Can AI teach my child maths?
- Partly. The answer here is PARTLY. It generates practice questions, worked answers and patient explanations on demand, which is real help. It also gets arithmetic confidently wrong just often enough to matter, and it cannot see your child, so the teaching, noticing confusion, keeping them going, stays with you.
- Is ChatGPT accurate enough for primary school maths?
- Mostly, and mostly is the problem: an error rate a teacher would notice is invisible to a tired parent at homework time. Check every worked answer yourself before it reaches the child, and ask for methods consistent with how UK schools teach, because the default often is not.
- What is the best free alternative to a maths tutor?
- Khan Academy is free, structured and self-marking, which covers the practice half of tutoring. A chat covers the explain-it-again half. What neither covers is the relationship: a tutor commonly charges £25 to £45 an hour largely to keep a child engaged, and that part does not automate.
- Will using AI for homework stop my child learning?
- Used as an answer machine, yes: the homework gets done and the child does not change. Used by you to generate practice and explanations you work through together, it is closer to a tutor's worksheet. The difference is not the tool, it is whether the child or the model does the thinking.
Nearby answers
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