What I built when I left the classroom
After 18 years in primary teaching, mostly Year 4, my last day in school was at Easter. Today my contract ends.
I spent the four weeks in between - the gap between leaving the classroom and being able to publicly run a company - finishing something I'd been working on in fits and starts for over a year. It's called Kickstone Fluency. It's live now at kickstone.uk/fluency.
This post is what it is, what it isn't and why I built it.
The photocopying problem
Most primary teachers I know spend a meaningful chunk of their planning time generating, hunting for, or amending maths practice sheets. White Rose lessons, Power Maths follow-ups, Twinkl downloads, scrappy bus-stop sheets typed up at half-eleven the night before. Some are excellent. Most are not designed for variation. Almost none of them adapt to the three groups in your class who need three different versions of the same content.
The result, year after year: a teacher tweaking, retyping, photocopying, hand-annotating - and a class still ending up with a one-size-fits-not-quite-everyone sheet on a Tuesday.
I wanted a tool that did the boring bit (the layout, the question generation, the differentiation) so the teacher could focus on the bit only the teacher can do (the conversation in front of the children).
What Fluency is
Fluency is a UK-curriculum-aligned maths worksheet generator for Y1-6. Pick a topic, pick a year group, pick a level, click Generate. You get a classroom-ready PDF in seconds. Print it, photocopy it, hand it out.
Three things make it different from "type-in-a-form" generators:
1. NCETM-style variation built into every sheet. Connected question families - not random number generation. Children see what changes and what stays the same. They notice patterns instead of grinding through unrelated problems.
2. Three adaptive teaching levels on every topic. Scaffolded, Core, Depth. Same content, differentiated structure. Not lower expectations - that's the EEF's main warning on within-class grouping. Differentiation here is by support and challenge structure, not by ceiling.
3. Bus-stop scaffolds with gradual release. Three tiers per method: pre-printed digits, empty frame, plain grid. The structure teaches the method, then fades.
Plus the things you'd hope for: vocabulary-annotated first questions for SEND-aware support, a Think Deeper reasoning prompt on every sheet, photocopy-survival design (clear at 7pt, no faint greys, works when the staffroom copier has three years left to retire).
What Fluency isn't
This bit matters more than the feature list, because the edtech world is full of things that overpromise.
Fluency isn't an adaptive assessment platform. We don't measure, we don't score, we don't report. The data on whether a child has understood the concept lives where it's always lived: in the conversation between the teacher and the child.
It isn't an AI tutor. There's no personalised algorithm "adapting" to each pupil. Worksheets are human-designed - the variation principles, scaffolding tiers and curriculum sequencing are all teacher decisions baked into how the generator works.
It isn't a scheme replacement. White Rose, Power Maths, NCETM, Maths No Problem - schemes are good and Fluency runs alongside them, not instead of them. You pick a topic for what your class needs to drill today, regardless of which unit your scheme is on this week.
It isn't a textbook. The teaching is still the teaching. A worksheet doesn't teach anything by itself.
Why Kickstone
Kickstone Learning Ltd is an independent UK company. Fluency is the first product. There are others coming - reading-comprehension generation, school-website compliance work and more - but each one starts from the same instinct: build the thing the teacher I used to be wished existed.
The narrative arc is practitioner-to-product. I've been on the receiving end of every edtech tool that promised to save time and didn't. The bar Fluency tries to clear: would teacher-me have actually used this on a Tuesday morning? If the answer is no, the feature doesn't make it in.
Pricing and free tier
Fluency is £3.50 a month or £35 a year. The first three downloads are free, no card needed - so you can see whether it works in your lesson before paying.
Kickstone Base Camp is the free tier. Once a month, you get one printable and one teaching tip in your inbox. GDPR-compliant. No upsell. Sign up at kickstone.uk/basecamp.
What I'd ask of you
Two things, if you teach primary maths:
Try it on a topic you'd be photocopying anyway. A Y3 column-addition sheet, a Y5 ratio set. Use it in a real lesson. See if it actually works.
Tell me what's wrong with it. Honest feedback is the only thing that improves the product. Email david@kickstone.uk or comment wherever you found this.
The next post will be on the pedagogy under the hood - variation theory, deliberate practice and gradual release - and how those translate into specific design decisions on the sheet. Subscribe to Base Camp at kickstone.uk/basecamp if you want it in your inbox.
David Hunter Founder, Kickstone Learning Ltd