Why Did My UK Secondary School Stop Using Sparx Maths? A Teacher’s Experience
I’m sitting at my cluttered Year 9 form desk, half a cold builders’ tea next to my laptop, and I just hit reply on the third email this week from a parent asking why we don’t use Sparx anymore. I can’t blame them for asking—four years ago, our whole department was sold on how it would fix homework stress and cut teacher marking time. Today, the old login link we still have on our website just leads to a dead page. We stopped using it back in March, and from where I stand, it’s unlikely we’ll bring it back.
We adopted Sparx in 2019, not long after the new national curriculum dropped. Our multi-academy trust pushed the platform heavily, saying every other school in the trust was seeing higher completion rates and less time spent marking. At first, I thought it was a win. No more hauling a stack of exercise books home to mark on Sunday night. Automatic grading meant kids got instant feedback, and parents could log on to see exactly what their child had mastered that week. I even kept the branded promotional pen they gave us at the London education show for a couple of years.
Then the small, consistent problems started piling up. The first red flag came from our lower ability Year 7 sets. 28% of our students receive free school meals, and a quarter of our parents told us in a casual check-in that their kids didn’t have reliable internet or a personal device to do homework on. The library was only open 20 minutes before school, which was no use for kids who had to drop younger siblings at primary first, or get the bus in right on the bell. Kids were turning up with zero completion, not because they couldn’t be bothered, but because they couldn’t access the platform.
Next came the algorithm issues. I had a Year 8 student called Jake, who has dyslexia and struggles with fine motor skills. He can work through a problem perfectly on paper, but typing answers into the tiny Sparx answer box was a nightmare. One night he spent an hour on 12 questions, got all the working right, but 8 were marked wrong just because he didn’t put a space after a decimal, or write the fraction in the exact order the program expected. He deleted the app off his phone that night and refused to use it for three weeks. It wasn’t just kids with additional needs, either. I lost count of how many times I had to override marks in the system because the program marked a correct answer wrong for no clear reason.
By autumn last year, enough of us were fed up that we ran an anonymous survey for students and parents. The results were pretty clear: 70% of students said they felt more anxious about maths homework since we started using Sparx, and 52% of parents said they spent more than 20 minutes a night helping their child work around glitches instead of just supporting the work itself. That same term, the provider put their subscription up 15%—costing us nearly £12,000 a year for our 1200-student school. The department voted 18-4 to drop it.
It hasn’t been a perfect transition, but it’s taught me a few things that are useful for both teachers and parents, whether your school still uses Sparx or you’re looking for a better homework setup.
For schools thinking of dropping a expensive digital platform like we did, our solution turned out to be far simpler and lower cost than I expected. We went back to printed 15-20 minute homework sheets for Key Stage 3, 30 minutes for Key Stage 4. We built a shared bank of sheets aligned to our curriculum, half retrieval practice and half new skill work, that we rotate every two years. To keep marking workload low (the whole reason we got Sparx in the first place), we rotate marking too: one teacher marks all homework for one year group per week, so every teacher only marks homework once every six weeks. It’s the same average workload as it was with Sparx, no subscription fee, and kids without internet already have a physical copy to take home.
For parents whose children still attend a school that uses Sparx, there are small, concrete things you can do to cut down on stress without fighting the whole system. First, set a hard 30-minute time limit for homework, regardless of what percentage completion the app says you need. If your child worked the whole time and didn’t finish, just send a quick email to their teacher saying that—when we used Sparx, we always accepted that, and most teachers will. Second, if the algorithm keeps throwing questions that your child gets wrong over and over, email the maths department to ask them to check your child’s target level. Most schools set targets based on expected GCSE grades as early as Year 7, which are often way higher than what kids are ready for right now, so the algorithm just keeps ramping up difficulty before they’ve mastered the basics. Third, if the app marks a correct answer wrong because of formatting, have your child take a photo of their working on paper and send it to their teacher to override the mark. Teachers know the formatting glitch is a constant problem, and we’re allowed to change marks whenever we need to—most parents just don’t know that.
We still get questions from parents asking when we’ll bring Sparx back, and some miss the automatic progress tracking it offered. We’ve had to put in extra work to send half-termly progress updates, and we still have kids who don’t complete homework, same as we did before. But since we stopped using it, overall homework completion has gone up 18%, and I’ve had far fewer kids come to form time upset about staying up late to hit a 100% completion target. It’s not a perfect solution, and it wouldn’t be the right fit for every school, but for ours, it was the right call. I still see other schools around the UK trialling it, and I don’t judge them for trying it—all we can do is what works for our kids.
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