Teaching time without tears: rethinking how we teach time in Key Stages 1 and 2

Teaching time can be incredibly difficult, both for teachers and pupils. Drawing on her work with primary schools across the Inspiration Trust and Angles Maths Hub, Laura Smith explores why telling the time is such a complex area of the curriculum, and how a different sequencing of learning, with well-chosen representations, may help children build more secure understanding.

Laura Smith is a primary maths lead for the Inspiration Trust. The Trust is based in Norfolk and North Suffolk with 18 academies: eight primary schools, nine secondary schools and one sixth form college, collectively serving 10,000 pupils and students. Laura works as part of a central primary maths team that provides strategic leadership for mathematics across the primary phase. She is leading the redesign of the trust’s primary maths curriculum and programme of professional development, with a focus on coherence, progression and alignment with the principles of teaching for mastery. As a Primary Mastery Specialist and NCETM Professional Development Lead for Angles Maths Hub, Laura works with schools to support the implementation of the Mastering Number at Reception and KS1 Programme. 

Here, she reflects on one area of the curriculum that has traditionally proved particularly challenging – teaching children to tell the time – and explains how she and her colleagues at Inspiration Trust have worked to rethink its sequencing and pedagogy.

Do you enjoy teaching children time? No…?

I used to hate it too. 

Teaching time is one of the areas of the primary maths curriculum that is often approached with a sense of dread. Not only does it draw on prior knowledge from a wide range of mathematical concepts, but in many cases it also conflicts with that prior knowledge.

The difficulty starts with the language we use. Words such as hands and face suddenly take on very different meanings. While we usually think of hands as being the same, on a clock they represent measurements of two entirely different things.

On a clock face, children’s understanding of number and the linear number system is also challenged. Both 0 and 60 minutes are represented by the same position on a curved number line, something that directly contradicts what they already know.

And then there is the idea that a single numeral can represent multiple quantities. For example, the number 9 can represent:

• 9 o’clock (9 hours)
• 21:00 on a 24 hour clock
• 45 minutes past the hour, or
• 15 minutes to the next hour.

So the same position on the clock face can mean 45 minutes past or 15 minutes to the hour.

Does your brain hurt yet? Mine too. It’s no wonder so many of us feel like crying quietly in a corner when it comes to teaching time. 

Exploring another way

But what if there was a way to sequence this learning so that it built on children’s prior knowledge, rather than conflicting with it? 

Last year, the Inspiration Trust tasked me with trying to find one, so off down the research rabbit hole I went.

Previously, I had taught time using an approach first brought to prominence by Kristen Weiss in an article for the NCETM, Telling the time: a non-standard approach (2019), and later developed further by Clare Sealy in her excellent post for Third Space Learning blog, Teaching Time & Telling the Time to KS1 & KS2: Your NEW Fail-Safe Step by Step Technique (2025). 

I loved the way learning was partitioned, beginning with a linear number line that was later transformed into a circular clock.

It is a brilliant way of building directly on children’s understanding of number lines. Teaching each unit in isolation – hours first and then minutes – then allows pupils to develop secure understanding before the two are combined.

However, where I consistently struggled, and where many children struggle, was when we moved on to telling the time to the next hour.

The problem with ‘past’ and ‘to’

Past and to are prepositions. They are language concepts being applied to a mathematical idea, and they are often introduced before children have been formally taught these grammatical structures in English. This progression does not make sense.

Understanding that we can tell the time using the relative position of the minute hand in relation to the hour hand is a complex concept, particularly for a six year old. It relies on secure understanding of units of time, fractions and relational language.

In some countries, such as China, prepositional language is not used initially. As described by Kirsten Weiss’s (2019) NCETM article exploring practice observed in Shanghai, time is first expressed in a digital format (for example, saying 8:20), and only later are alternative ways of expressing time using prepositional language – such as past and to – introduced. This allows children to develop secure conceptual understanding before grammatical complexity is layered on. That felt like an important insight.

Setting an alternative path

So this is what I did. I merged the two approaches.

First, units of time such as the months of the year and days of the week were introduced using a linear structure before being represented in a circular one, helping children see time as a continuous cycle.

The same approach was then used when teaching the hours on an analogue clock:

• first on a linear number line
• then as a circular representation
• and, crucially, recorded digitally.

The same sequence was then applied to minutes.

In Key Stage 1, children only recorded times digitally when the minutes were greater than 10 (for example, 4:15). This avoids introducing the concept of zero as a placeholder (as in 4:05) before it has been taught, and prevents misconceptions caused by inconsistent recording of single digit numbers.

Once children could confidently read and record hours and minutes in isolation, we then taught how the two units could be combined.

By the end of Key Stage 1, children were able to:

• read an analogue clock
• record the time digitally
• convert confidently between the two.

Introducing ‘past’ and ‘to’ later

It was only in Key Stage 2 that children were introduced to the language of past and to.

By this point, pupils had:

• a secure understanding of units of time
• compositional knowledge of 60
• experience with fractions
• multiplicative reasoning with groups of 5.

Now, the language made sense. It could be taught with genuine contextual understanding, rather than as an arbitrary rule to memorise.

What next?

After many meetings and lengthy, but enjoyable, discussions involving the whole Inspiration Trust Maths Team, we are united in our approach.

We now have a carefully-sequenced, consistent approach that supports children’s understanding through one of the most interconnected and conceptually complex areas of the primary maths curriculum. This method is now being rolled out across all our primary schools and embedded across a wider range of year groups.

Early signs are positive, but only time will tell!