What 124 Children Did With Their Summer

At nine o'clock on a Tuesday morning in the middle of the summer holiday, with school shut and nobody taking a register that counted for anything, a group of children going into Year 10 and Year 11 logged in to do maths.

Six weeks is the longest stretch of the year in which a child who has fallen behind can fall further. The children who would gain most from that time are the least likely to be offered any of it, because a summer of tuition costs more than most families can find.

Between 20 July and 28 August 2026, Purple Ruler taught 124 children GCSE maths across the holidays, in small live groups, two lessons a week. Eighteen schools put children forward and seven of Purple Ruler's teachers gave the six weeks. It cost the schools nothing and the families nothing, because it was never meant to be sold.

Behind the scenes

Children who have fallen behind in maths and know it are rarely short of willingness. They are short of a route. The gap is not really about teaching. It is about who can afford to buy a July.

Purple Ruler had the teachers, and it had the timetable space, so it gave both away. There was no charge to any school, no charge to any parent, and nothing asked in return. The only request made of the eighteen schools was that they think carefully about which children to tell.

That part matters more than it sounds. A free place is only useful if it reaches the right child, and the people who know which child that is are the heads of year who see them every day. Eighteen schools did that work for nothing too.

How the groups were built

No single school has enough children working at the same grade, free at the same hour of an August morning, to fill a class. Eighteen schools together do. Children were placed by working grade into three bands, every group drew from several schools at once, and each group kept the same teacher for the whole six weeks.

That is the quiet mechanism that made it possible. A school with four children who needed this could never have staffed a class of four. It did not have to.

What they covered was ordinary GCSE ground: ratio, percentages, quadratics, circle theorems, trigonometry, probability. None of it needed to know which exam board a school had chosen, which is why eighteen schools could share a class.

Who came, and how often

Thirteen children attended every one of their lessons, twelve sessions each in most cases, from the third week of July to the end of August. Fifty-one children came to three quarters or more. At one school, five of the seventeen who took a place never missed once.

Among the children who stayed with it, attendance ran at 79 per cent across the whole six weeks, in August, with nothing at all obliging them to be there.

Nothing required them to be. No register counted towards anything, no school was open, and nobody was going to ring home. They came because a teacher was expecting them and because it was helping.

What actually changed

Every lesson began and ended with the same short check, so there is a record of what each child could do at nine o'clock and what they could do an hour later.

In the 340 lessons where a child arrived without already having it right, they left with a better score three times out of four. Averaged across those lessons, children scored 56 per cent at the start of the hour and 83 per cent by the end of it. Not a grade, not an exam, and not a claim about anybody's GCSE. Just an hour in which a child who could not do something could then do it, measured, six hundred and eighty five times over a summer.

What the families said

Three families tell us how the summer went.

Nick's reason for saying yes was the plainest one there is: maths was the subject his daughter was behind on, and the six-week holiday was six weeks of nothing.

Scarlett said there was nothing to change about the programme. We asked why she would do it again nearer her exams, she gave the answer that explains the whole thing: "I always do better when someone's teaching me than when I'm teaching myself."

Two other families wrote in during August. Both of their children were among the thirteen, each of them present for all twelve lessons.

The Outcome

The children who came have something they did not have in July: six weeks of GCSE maths behind them, and a teacher who knows how they work. Several of the eighteen schools have asked whether the same groups can carry on into the school year.

It is a modest thing, in the end, and it is meant to be. One hundred and twenty-four children were given six weeks of teaching they could not otherwise have had, by Purple Ruler that had six weeks of teaching to give. Thirteen of them took every hour of it.

Purple Ruler intends to run it again next summer, for more children, in more schools.