Japan is a world leader for maths - what can we learn?

Something unusual happened in the hall of Three Bridges Primary School in West London in March of this year. A group of 50 Year 5 pupils sat in a U-shape around a teacher from Tsukuba University Primary School in Japan and took part in a maths lesson, taught through a translator.

“I wasn’t sure how the children would respond,” says Jeremy Hannay, executive head of Three Bridges, who helped to organise and host the event. “They’ve had guest teachers before from different countries, but all of them spoke English.”

He needn’t have worried. The lesson, he continues, was “really interesting” and the children engaged well with it. The staff had designed the layout of the room to be as close as possible to what a classroom in Japan would look like, putting eight whiteboards across the front of the room to represent a single long board.

“It really grabbed the kids straight away,” he says. “It didn’t feel like anything was lost in the fact that they weren’t speaking English.”

The visit was organised by Collaborative Lesson Research UK (CLR-UK), a small education charity led by Geoffrey Wake, emeritus professor at the University of Nottingham. Wake has spent 14 years building relationships with maths teachers and researchers in Japan, and has become one of the UK’s foremost advocates for adopting elements of the Japanese approach to teaching the subject.

How Japan teaches maths

So why the interest in the Japanese approach? The country’s performance in the global maths league tables is, of course, a factor: Japan consistently outranks England, scoring among the highest in the world. In the 2025 Pisa results, published last week, Japan’s 15-year-olds placed first among Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries and fifth globally, while those in England came 10th globally. Likewise, in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss) 2023, England placed ninth for maths in Year 5 and sixth for Year 9, while Japan came fifth and fourth respectively.

But there is more to this than just league table performance. The March event was part of a two-day programme combining a curriculum workshop with the live demonstration lesson, and it drew educators from across Europe, all trying to answer the same question: what exactly is it that Japan does differently, and what could we adopt here?

“Japanese maths lessons are taught through problem solving,” Wake explains. “There’s a lot of thinking and reasoning and working out, but it’s not about solving lots of questions.”

In a typical Japanese primary lesson, he says, a single maths problem is given to the class. Children work on it individually or in pairs, then the bulk of the lesson is spent discussing the different approaches pupils have taken (see box below). The teacher’s role is not to transmit a method but to orchestrate a collective investigation, and there is no rush to the answer. In fact, Wake recalls observing lessons in which the answer was given to pupils at the outset and the lesson then took the form of working out how to get there.

This philosophy is deeply embedded in the curriculum and has been for a long time. Japanese maths textbooks have remained remarkably consistent for generations, with the same tasks reappearing across decades. Wake describes visiting a publisher and being shown how a task from the original 1955 edition still appears in the current full-colour version.

There is a sense of coherence running through the entire curriculum, Wake explains. In grade one, for example, young children always line objects up horizontally when counting, which lays the groundwork for number lines and further development.

“From those lines they go to using double number lines, to then using Cartesian graphs, where you swing one of the lines around, so you can start to develop functions,” he says. “It’s very complex and sequential, rather than just teaching isolated topics.”

The approach is distinct from the other Asian maths methods that have already become popular in UK classrooms. The Singapore method focuses on mastery of a few topics explored in depth, using a concrete-pictorial-abstract progression technique to build mathematical understanding. The Shanghai approach, meanwhile, eschews ability streaming to move pupils forward together through small, structured steps and deep conceptual understanding.

Sarah Leakey is a primary teacher in the Scottish Highlands who has made three separate trips to Japan to observe mathematics lessons. She now uses Japanese textbooks in her own classroom (something that is easier to do in Scotland, she explains, because the Scottish curriculum specifies outcomes by broad levels rather than year groups, giving teachers more flexibility).

Lesson study

Her journey into Japanese maths came through lesson study (the collaborative process by which Japanese teachers collectively plan a lesson, observe it being taught, then discuss what happened), which sits at the heart of the Japanese approach and gives CLR-UK its name. She describes being influenced by research from Akihiko Takahashi, a Japanese mathematician who has spent much of his career in the US and who identifies three levels of mathematics teaching.

“Level one is about teachers being able to tell students basic facts or concepts or procedures, so it’s more transmission-based,” she explains. “Level two is about being able to explain why those facts or procedures work, but it’s still more teacher-directed. And then level three teaching is more about the children working through problems that the teacher is setting, starting to make sense of things and, with support and guidance, changing their thinking and understanding.”

Leakey is frank about her own pedagogical journey. She was “definitely at level one” at the beginning of her career, and it was what she saw in Japanese classrooms that gave her a model for what level three could actually look like in practice.

One of the most striking differences she observed was what happens when pupils share different approaches to solving a problem, she explains. In many UK classrooms using problem-solving approaches, she says, there is a tendency to celebrate all methods equally, whereas the Japanese approach is more evaluative, with different approaches compared and critiqued.

“They’re being more critical about what is being shared, and the strengths and limitations of that,” she explains. “Not in a trying-to-outdo-each-other kind of way, but trying to deepen their understanding.”

Leakey is also currently working on developing what the Japanese call bansho (board work). In a Japanese classroom, a wide chalkboard running almost the full width of the room tells the story of the entire lesson. Nothing is erased. Children come up and write their ideas and the board becomes a visible record of a lesson’s intellectual journey, from opening problem to collective conclusion.

“There’s the start of the lesson and the end of the lesson, so you can see the shift in thinking,” she says. “It becomes very easy for the pupils to make sense of this evolution and pick up on ideas that have come before.”

Japanese teachers make it look “so easy when they’re doing it”, Leakey laughs, but she admits that it is a complex practice to adopt.

Can it work in classrooms here?

There’s a question around how far UK teachers can realistically replicate the Japanese approach, Hannay says. He has visited Japan and is thoughtful about what might transfer and what might not. Three Bridges has used lesson study for over a decade, he says, and the school already teaches mathematics in ways that he says align broadly with what he saw Japanese teachers doing. But he acknowledges that there is, of course, much happening in Japanese classrooms that goes beyond technique.

“In a Japanese school, it isn’t unusual to see a huddle of children around a child who is struggling with the concepts,” he says. “The British culture is far more focused on the results rather than the process. And that’s not something that you can snap your fingers and shift overnight.”

He draws a direct connection between classroom culture and wider society.

“When I was in Japanese schools, I saw the children, even as young as six years old, deeply interested in supporting other children to learn in a meaningful way, with no ego. It’s a really different set-up.”

He notes that he saw the same ethos on the Tokyo metro, where strangers would shift even to the point of discomfort to create space for children travelling alone.

Whether the school shapes the society or the society shapes the school is, Hannay continues, a big question. But he argues that some things can shift, and that the deepest value of the CLR exchange was not in the demonstration lesson itself but in the professional conversations it sparked.

“That’s the pièce de résistance,” he explains, “the conversations that take place during and after the lesson, both on the day and then subsequently later. That’s the most important thing. And I think that those are actually very Japanese.”

So what would it take to bring more of this mindset and practice into UK schools?

Both Wake and Leakey identify time as the central issue. Lesson study is not a quick professional development session, as it requires teachers to sit together and think slowly and carefully about maths, Leakey says. That needs space to explore what a particular problem will reveal about children’s thinking, what misconceptions might emerge and how they will respond in the moment.

Wake puts it more bluntly. “Just providing teachers with some space to talk about teaching this subject is hugely important. It’s quite missing. Where does that happen? Department meetings are about the next coming assessment, and who’s writing the test paper. It’s not that everything’s perfect in Japan. But looking at another country’s way of doing things really gives a lot of insight into what you’re doing yourself.”

Perhaps, then, the most important thing the UK could take from Japan is not its approach to maths lessons but its positioning of teachers as subject experts who work collaboratively. The lesson content matters, but the conversation afterwards might matter more.

Zofia Niemtus is a freelance writer