Northampton grandfather flexes his maths toolkit to support home-schooling parents during lockdown

A Northampton grandfather has adapted his 20-year-old maths toolkit for parents struggling with home-schooling during the coronavirus lockdown.

Tony Campbell's Maths Home Schooling Kit contains flexible tables allowing primary school children up to year seven to grasp the basics of addition, subtraction, multiplication and fractions.

Like many parents and grandparents, he is concerned about how the closure of schools will impact on children’s education and wanted to do something to help.

“I’m seeing the challenges home-schooling is having for parents and children – even with my own grandchildren," he said.

"My grown-up daughter, Jemma, is dyslexic and she really struggled at school and also suffered with dyscalculia, which is number blindness.

"I suddenly realised my product could help parents and children throughout the UK and overseas.”

Tony, whose working life was spent in sales and marketing, spotted the potential of Flexitables over 20 years ago as an easy-to-use classroom learning and hands-on manipulative maths product.

They can help children learn multiplication/division, fractions, square roots, addition/subtraction, decimals and percentages.

He was originally introduced to the prototype by his patent attorney, who was working on behalf of a non-teaching assistant that had produced a rudimentary version but had no idea how to take it to market.

Tony said: “There was and still is nothing else like it on the market and I encouraged the inventor to proceed with her patent applications.

"She was an interesting woman who, after having obtained patents in both the UK and USA, decided to sell them to me as she wanted to follow her vocation and join the prison service and teach maths to criminals in her local jail.

"I then took over the domestic and export marketing of Flexitables so that they are now sold here and all over Scandinavia, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Benelux, Canada and the USA.”

Originally aimed at mainstream schools, Tony found special educational needs coordinator took an interest in Flexitables.

The grids are particularly helpful to pupils with dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD and autism as they are designed to be manipulated, they help with hand/eye/brain co-ordination.

Pupils who have difficulty following their eyes across a line of information, known as tracking, also find the horizontal and vertical channels extremely helpful in getting the correct answer.

Both of Tony’s children, Jemma and her twin brother, Jeremy, have children but none of them show signs of any learning difficulties.

In fact, Tony’s grandson, Jack, 14, actually taught his mum Jemma GCSE maths last year when she was 44 – and with his help, she passed!

To find out more about the maths kit, visit flexitable.co.uk.