Ask any parent what they want from their child’s maths education and you’ll hear a version of the same thing: not just marks, but fluency — the quiet confidence of a child who sees a problem and simply knows what to do. Yet a growing number of Indian parents have arrived at an uncomfortable realisation: the school bell alone doesn’t get them there.

In a 2026 study of 811 urban parents across eight Indian cities, 46% said school maths, on its own, is not enough to build the capability they want for their child. This isn’t a complaint about teachers or textbooks. It’s a recognition of a structural limit. A classroom of forty students, moving at one pace through a fixed syllabus, is built to introduce concepts well. It is not built to deliver the one thing fluency actually requires: volume of practice, repeated often, with feedback.

The curriculum gap is a practice gap

Maths is unusual among school subjects. A child can understand a history chapter by reading it once. Math doesn’t work that way — understanding a method and being fluent in it are two different things, and only one of them is produced by explanation. The other is produced by doing.

This is exactly where the standard school day falls short. There is enough time to teach a concept, but rarely enough to let every child practise it to mastery before the class moves on. The result is a child who “gets it” in the lesson and freezes in the exam — not because they lack ability, but because they lack reps. When parents say school maths isn’t enough, this is the gap they’re pointing at. It is not a gap in teaching. It is a gap in practice.

Parents are choosing routine over rescue

What’s genuinely new is how parents are responding. The old reflex was remedial: wait for marks to slip, then bring in a tutor to patch the damage. The emerging behaviour is the opposite. In the same study, 41% of parents now prioritise regular practice and revision as a core part of how they choose any maths support — ahead of exam-specific coaching, ahead of doubt-clearing on demand.

This is a shift from remediation to routine. Urban households are increasingly treating maths not as a problem to be fixed when it breaks, but as a capability to be built continuously — a little every day, whether or not anything is “wrong.” The question has moved from “how do we rescue my child’s marks?” to “how do we make practice a habit my child doesn’t have to be dragged into?”

Borrow the model from sport, not from tuition

Here’s the most useful reframe for both schools and parents: after-school maths should look more like sports training than remedial teaching.

Think about how a child learns cricket or the piano. No one teaches the forward defensive once and expects it in a match. Skill is built through short, regular, deliberate practice — the same movements, repeated, slightly harder each week, with a coach watching and correcting. Nobody calls this remedial. Nobody waits for the child to fail before starting. Practice isthe plan.

Maths deserves the same architecture. Three things make it work:

● Short and daily beats long and occasional. Fifteen focused minutes a day builds more fluency than a two-hour cram on Sunday. The nervous system learns through repetition and rest, not marathon sessions.

● Mixed review, not just the current chapter. Athletes don’t only practise this week’s drill; they keep older skills warm. Maths practice should revisit past topics so they don’t decay — the way spaced revision actually cements recall.

● Feedback close to the effort. A drill without correction builds the wrong muscle memory. Practice should surface mistakes quickly enough that the child fixes the method, not just the answer.

For schools, this means rethinking homework from “finish these ten sums” to a designed practice routine — spaced, mixed, and lightly tracked. For parents, it means protecting a small daily slot and resisting the urge to only step in at exam time.

The takeaway

The parents in this study have, collectively, worked something out that education systems are slower to act on: fluency is a training outcome, not a teaching outcome. You cannot lecture a child into speed and confidence any more than you can lecture them into a cover drive. You build it — in short, consistent, well-coached reps. The classroom starts the job. The practice routine finishes it.

The author, D L Prachotan, is Co-founder and head of Business Development at Bhanzu