In the autumn of 2024, New Zealand’s minister of education, Erica Stanford, announced that the country’s schools had not been setting students up for success in maths, and that her office was taking “swift action” to change course.

The new Make It Count initiative focuses on what Stanford calls “structured maths” for Years 0-8. According to the New Zealand Ministry of Education, it follows the general idea of “structured literacy”, a systematic approach focused on explicit teaching, mastering fundamentals, screening and assessment, in order to closely monitor students’ progress.

The teacher training, new curriculum and assessments have come a year earlier than previously planned (at the start of the 2025 school year, rather than in 2026), due in part to low maths scores in the Curriculum Insights and Progress Study (CIPS). Results showed that only 22 per cent of all students, and 12 per cent of Maori students, were proficient in mathematics in Year 8 (pupils aged 11.5 to 13, equivalent to Year 8 in England). The new target for “structured maths” is to have 80 per cent of Year 8 students proficient in maths by 2030.

“It’s about getting the focus of our curriculum back to the basics,” Stanford said in an official announcement last year. 

The move to a more structured, systematic approach to teaching maths, especially in primary school, is buoyed by recent success in “structured literacy”. Other countries, such as England and Australia, have also put a spotlight on revamping how maths is taught in recent years, even if they’re not using the term “structured maths” to describe it.

As for the United States’ adoption of a more evidence-based approach to maths, change has been slow and more sporadic, and hasn’t necessarily followed its jump into the science of reading. So, is a shift really needed?

Maths achievement has flatlined or declined across much of the Anglosphere for the past decade, experts say, and a new approach is warranted. But does “structured maths” exist as a fair equivalent to structured literacy? And if so, is it an approach that more countries should be adopting?

What is ‘structured maths’?

Structured literacy is a trademarked term created by the International Dyslexia Association more than a decade ago as an umbrella to identify evidence-based programmes and practices aligning with decades of evidence on how the brain learns to read. It applies not only to struggling readers and students with dyslexia, but to all students.

Structured literacy addresses both the “what” of literacy instruction - including phonics, the roots of words and the structure of syllables, as well as comprehension - and the “how”. It calls for teaching that is systematic, explicit, diagnostic and tailored to individual students’ gaps.

Maths doesn’t have an official equivalent to structured literacy - at least not yet. Stanford explained to reporters last year that her use of the term “structured maths” just refers to teaching practices compatible with the science of learning.

“It’s really no different to structured literacy,” she said. “It’s explicit teaching, in a structured manner, mastering the basics before you move on, and then making sure we’re assessing along the way to make sure that they’re on track.”

Researcher Brian Poncy, a psychologist at Oklahoma State University in the US, says that substantial evidence exists on how to teach maths so more kids can master it. There has been a grassroots movement to call that evidence the “science of math” in the US, to make it easier for teachers to make a connection to the “science of reading”.

Poncy thinks the term “structured maths” is also a useful way to think about that evidence, and to draw a fair comparison to literacy. But, in the US at least, there is still fiery debate over the merits of many of the evidence-based practices associated with it.

“I think the importance of the term ‘structured’, when juxtaposed to ‘balanced’, is of the utmost importance,” Poncy says, referring to the so-called “math wars” that pit ideas like procedural and conceptual understanding against each other. “Balanced literacy”, which attempted to “balance” phonics and unhelpful practices that amounted to guessing at words, was largely a failure in the US, and places such as New Zealand as well. “This is where math shares those similarities to structured literacy. We need to define our scope and sequence, and we need to assess and use that assessment to inform our instructional practices.”

But it’s important to note that maths is a distinctly different domain from learning to read, experts say. In reading, once students learn to decode fluently, they are reading - even as they continue building more complex vocabulary and comprehension skills over time.

Cognitive scientists such as Daniel Ansari have suggested that there’s a maths equivalent of phonics - a set of foundational building blocks that are crucial to gaining more skill. But what constitutes mastery in maths long-term is a complex set of dozens of discrete skills, woven together over time. Recent research has shown that maths learning depends on both procedural and conceptual understanding, memorisation and problem-solving - at the right time, and in the right doses.

So, in evidence terms, clearly we need to be cautious in the associations with literacy. And, it seems, we need to take similar care around pedagogy, too.

If “structured maths” refers to highly structured lessons, says researcher Patrick Kirkland at the University of Notre Dame, in the US state of Indiana, there’s plenty of evidence to support it, although he points out that “structured approaches - or the science of math - are sometimes conflated with an overly procedural ‘let’s just get back to the basics’” approach.

Maths is more complicated than that, he continues. Structure works in some areas, while flexibility is key in others. “When it comes to a structured approach to teaching early numeracy - things like counting and cardinality - we have a decent amount on that from cognitive science,” he says. “But how do we introduce fractions? We know fractions on a number line are really important, but should we start with fraction circles, like some curricula do? Should we start with rectangular tape diagrams? Should we just start straight on the number line? There’s evidence for a lot of different ways.”

Versions of ‘structured maths’ in the UK and US

As a way around this, some countries that have introduced more structured approaches have attempted to create general principles of pedagogy. 

England’s efforts to reform maths, starting first in 2014 with the government-backed Mathematics Teaching for Mastery programme, call for structured lessons centred around interactive, whole-class instruction supported by modelling, questioning and worked examples - and proponents say it is part of raising England’s international profile. Once ranked at 27th place in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) for maths, England now ranks in 11th.

Reading reform has probably helped, too. “Kids who struggle with reading struggle with maths, and those improvements in reading have a bigger impact on maths than they do on English in some of our studies,” former UK schools minister Sir Nick Gibb said on a recent podcast. “Reading matters to everything, including maths.”

Teaching for Mastery and the 35 national Maths Hubs in England have moved schools away from more open-ended, discovery-based maths lessons, and ostensibly focus on a Singapore-style approach, covering fewer topics at greater depth. But, while these may be seen as positive developments, English teacher trainers such as Kristopher Boulton at Unstoppable Learning worry that the framework is so expansive that many schools have trouble nailing down exactly what they need to do.

“No one’s following a true mastery curriculum. The word has been co-opted to mean whatever people want it to mean, and so now everyone struggles to make sense of it,” Boulton says. “I would like to say that it at least signals something like structure and explicit teaching, but not even that. It’s become so malleable.”

Others have made a similar observation. Writing for Tes, maths experts David Thomas and Peter Foulds previously argued that, in England, “we muddle fluency and problem-solving. We lack a clear conception of how they relate”.

Boulton says successful maths learning requires something much more specific than what’s outlined in most mastery frameworks. His work with teachers is about breaking maths skills down into organised, small increments and engineering teaching so students can’t fail, drawing on the evidence-based Direct Instruction technique developed by American behavioural psychologists in the 1960s and 70s.

In contrast, the US doesn’t even have a framework, and is further behind England in maths reform; while a handful of states have passed legislation for improved screening and support for struggling maths learners, most have declined to specify teaching techniques in the way they’ve done with literacy.

Despite the lack of official reform, however - much like in England a decade ago - there is a growing grassroots movement of teachers and leaders who are turning to approaches that look a lot like “structured maths”. The Science of Math Facebook group, for example, where predominantly US-based teachers and leaders exchange ideas on more structured maths lessons, now has almost 35,000 members.

Researchers such as Poncy have also seen growing interest in the “structured maths” approach. His well-researched, free intervention aiding students with fact fluency, called Facts on Fire, has seen a surge of interest from teachers and schools wanting to use it in their lessons.

Can the structured approach resolve ‘maths wars’?

For some, the appeal of “structured maths” goes beyond raising attainment; it’s seen as a way of settling ongoing debates that have long dogged the subject.

Historically, a swing towards one side of a pedagogical argument has been followed by a swing to the other. Yet “structured maths” seems to represent a progressive switch towards a single, evidence-based solution.

Reporter Emily Hanford, host of the Sold a Story podcast, which has been credited with bringing awareness of the science of reading to a mainstream American audience, said she hoped cognitive science could stop the wild pendulum swings in teaching children to read.

“I was hoping that the reporting would help this time be different,” she told Edutopia last year. “I don’t like the analogy of the pendulum; it swings back and forth, with no sense of progress.”

The same has been said about maths: some experts say that arguments such as whether to focus on procedures or concepts have been going on for a hundred years and the hope is that structured maths might be able to finally settle these.

Yet others question whether the approach will have any impact here, or if it could even inflame tensions further.

Researchers like Christian Bokhove, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Southampton, are sceptical. “I think a label like ‘structured maths’ being presented… as an analogy to the reading developments (or dare I say ‘reading wars’) is exactly the kind of juxtaposition of views, as well as lack of acknowledgement of wider and historical mathematics education literature, that is very unhelpful,” he says. “It also doesn’t sound so special: ‘It’s explicit teaching, in a structured manner, mastering the basics before you move on, and then making sure we’re assessing along the way to make sure that they’re on track.’ Isn’t that just mastery?”

“So if someone says, ‘Oh, this is a completely unique perspective of mathematics, like structured literacy,’ it’s basically old wine in new wineskins,” he continues. “There’s some kind of nuance here. If we agree that procedural and conceptual knowledge are important, then we can quibble about what comes first. But wanting to give attention to conceptual knowledge doesn’t mean I don’t value the basic skills.”

Others argue that constant back-and-forth over how best to learn foundational maths skills prevents other important conversations about maths learning and holds students back from getting to enjoy some of its greater pleasures, like solving new problems.

“We deliberately do unstructured maths,” says David Thomas, CEO of Axiom Maths, a non-profit maths club providing enrichment for secondary students. But, he adds, students who haven’t mastered the basics can’t get to the “fun” part, which is often open-ended, unstructured problems.

“If you start in the unstructured, you can’t do it; you can’t enjoy it,” Thomas says. “You’ve got to do structured, remembering that the whole point of it is to be able to get to the unstructured - problems worth solving; exciting, meaningful things.”

On this point, the comparison with literacy works; it’s the equivalent of the idea that you can’t read for pleasure without first being able to decode.

But whether New Zealand’s “structured maths” is substantially different from what is already happening in countries such as England - and whether it has the clarity and heft to become a global movement to match the science of reading - is a different matter.

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