There is no secret schedule for the Junior or Intermediate Maths Challenge, and this article is not going to invent one. What follows is a shape — a way a family might spread the work of a term so it stays small enough to actually happen, built only out of things the practice room really does. Nothing here is enforced. Your child will not be nagged into a plan. But if you have ever looked at twelve past papers and wondered where to begin, this is a sensible answer.

The room lives at /study/jmc, reached from your child's Exams room, and it is titled simply "The Maths Challenge". Both competitions are the same format — 25 questions, 60 minutes, no calculator — and each has twelve past papers loaded, from 2015 to 2026. That is a lot of material for one term. The point of a shape is to stop it feeling like a mountain.

Week one: get one real paper in

The clinic — "Things to fix" — is where the useful work lives, and it starts empty: "Nothing yet — every wrong answer lands here with its name." It has nothing to say until your child has actually got some questions wrong.

So the first job is to give it something. Two honest ways:

  • Sit a full paper under the clock. Sixty minutes, one sitting, everything saved as you go. There is a five-minute warning, and when the clock runs out it is marked as it stands. Sitting a past paper is the closest thing to the real day.
  • Type in a paper they already sat at school. If your child took the Challenge last year, put the 25 letters in. Same result, no extra hour. Typing in a school paper is the fastest possible start.

Either way you end with a mark and a link that says "Take the wrong ones to the clinic". Follow it. That is week one done.

If you are not sure which competition your child sits, the switch in the room notes it plainly — Junior is Year 8 and below, Intermediate is Year 9 to 11 — and choosing between them takes about a minute.

Most weeks: a sprint, plus whatever the clinic caught

The middle of the term is where a shape earns its keep, and it is deliberately modest.

A sprint. Six questions, twelve minutes, one clock, no calculator. It is sealed: once it starts, the clock does not pause, so your child is asked to find somewhere quiet first. Only one can be open at a time. Twelve minutes is short enough to fit into a weeknight and long enough to feel like the real thing — that is the whole argument for the twelve-minute sprint.

Then the clinic. Every wrong answer from that sprint has already been filed under a named mistake — not under the paper it came from. The clinic's own subtitle is "Not by paper. By what keeps going wrong." Each mistake carries a count, so a mistake that has caught your child four times shows as ×4.

Work the biggest counts first. You do not have to work this out yourself; the room offers it. When your child chooses "Practise this one" from a mistake, one of the choices is Just the ×4s. There is a topic filter too, and an estimate before you commit — something like "6 questions · about 9 minutes · mixed up on purpose". Practising by the mistake rather than by the paper is the single biggest difference between this and working through a book.

Some weeks the clinic will be quiet and the sprint is the whole session. That is fine. Some weeks a single mistake will be worth all the time you have. That is also fine.

The spacing happens on its own

Here is the part that means you do not need a wall planner.

When your child works a mistake with Professor Pi, the room says what happens next, plainly: "Pi walks the ladder to a worked twin, then you redo yours. A re-trap is booked for a week later — that's what moves it, not the chat."

A re-trap is a different question that sets the same trap. Not the one they got wrong — a fresh one that offers the same tempting answer. And because it arrives roughly a week later, the term does its own spacing. Practise a mistake in week three and it comes back in week four, at the point where it is genuinely worth testing rather than merely remembered. Over a term, the work you did in the first month keeps returning without anyone scheduling it. That mechanism is worth understanding properly, so what a re-trap is is probably the next thing to read.

Outcomes are named without drama: clean, caught again, wrong but not that trap, or blank. "It caught you again" is described in the product as evidence, not a verdict — which is the right attitude to bring to a whole term.

Alongside this, the room's Cards for this shelf points at the competition's toolkit and past-year flashcard decks. Spaced practice for the ideas these papers keep asking. It costs a few minutes and it runs in the background of everything else; see flashcards and the Maths Challenge.

Occasionally: a whole paper again

Sprints and re-traps are precise but narrow. Every few weeks, sit a full paper — sixty minutes, all twenty-five questions, everything in one place. It tests something the short formats cannot: pacing, deciding what to skip, and holding concentration for an hour.

The full-paper grid shows which years have been sat and what the mark was, so it is easy to pick an untouched one. And it is worth saying now, before the marks start accumulating: the room will not tell you that a mark "would have been a Gold". Twenty-three of the twenty-four loaded papers have no published grade boundaries at all, so where they are missing, no tick row is drawn — not a greyed one, not an approximated one. Why we don't tell you it was a Gold explains the reasoning; the short version is that a made-up boundary is worse than no boundary.

The last stretch: rest, not new material

Be honest with yourself about the final week or two. New material this close to the day rarely lands, and it can shake a child's confidence at exactly the wrong moment.

What is worth doing:

  1. Let the booked re-traps come round. They were spaced for this.
  2. Keep the flashcards ticking. Small, familiar, low-stakes.
  3. Re-read the mistakes that have gone quiet. A quiet mistake is one that has stopped catching them — a good thing to look at and feel pleased about.
  4. Stop early. Arriving rested is a real advantage, and it is the one piece of preparation that nobody can practise for you.

One practical note on scoring, and it turns on the paper rather than the competition: a blank always scores zero, everywhere, but a wrong answer on the back ten questions costs 1 or 2 marks on every Intermediate paper and on the Junior papers from 2015 to 2019. Only Junior papers from 2020 onwards carry no penalty. That difference is worth a five-minute conversation before the day rather than a term of anxiety — blank, wrong, or a guess covers it.

FAQ

How long should a week of Maths Challenge practice actually take?

A sprint is six questions and twelve minutes on one clock. A re-trap set from the clinic gives you its own estimate before you start — something like six questions and about nine minutes. So a normal week is twenty to twenty-five minutes of real work, plus whatever conversation follows a mistake. Occasionally a full past paper takes sixty.

Does the product tell my child what to do each week?

No. There is no enforced schedule and no week-by-week plan the room hands out. What the room does is put the biggest thing first: the clinic shows a count of things to fix, and when you practise one it offers "Just the ×4s" so the most repeated mistake gets worked first. The shape of the term is yours to choose.

What should the last couple of weeks before the day look like?

Rest and revision, not new material. Meeting a new kind of question days before a competition tends to unsettle rather than help. Better to let the re-traps that were already booked come round, keep the flashcards ticking, and stop early enough that your child arrives fresh.

Duke Harewood built aitutors.me for his own KS3-aged daughter. The shape above is the one that survived contact with a real term and a real teenager — which mostly meant making it smaller. Updated 10 September 2026.