Who we are and why we built Penny Drop Maths

Penny Drop Maths is a KS2 maths diagnostic and personalised catch-up plan for parents of children in Years 4, 5 and 6 in England. The 20-minute diagnostic is free and finds the missing skill holding a child back. We built it because parents kept telling us the same thing: they knew something was wrong with their child's maths, but nobody could tell them precisely what.

The problem we set out to solve

A school report says "working towards expected". A tutor says "we're doing fractions". A practice app says "82% complete". None of that tells a parent the one thing they want to know: what is the actual gap, and what should we do first?

Maths is built in layers, and a child who is stuck on adding fractions is very often missing something much earlier and much smaller. Find that, fix that, and the "fractions problem" tends to disappear. Miss it, and no amount of practice on the top layer helps.

What we believe

• Diagnosis before practice. More questions are not the answer if they are the wrong questions.
• Plain English for parents. You should never need to decode a curriculum code to understand your own child's report.
• Calm, not pressure. No timers, no leaderboards, no streaks. Children learn better when they are not frightened of being wrong.
• Your child's data is not a product. It stays private to your household and is never used for advertising.

Who is behind Penny Drop Maths?

Zafar Karim, Founder and CEO

Penny Drop Maths started at home.

When Zafar Karim's daughter was in Year 5, she was performing significantly below her potential in maths. Trying to help could quickly become a familiar parental loop: "I already know this." "We've done this at school." "That's not how my teacher does it." "I don't understand what you mean." And, eventually, "This is boring."

So Zafar went back to the curriculum itself. He broke maths down into a hierarchy of skills and prerequisites, mapped how those skills fitted together and designed questions that tested understanding from the foundations upwards. The aim was simple: stop making a child repeat what they already knew, identify the precise gaps holding them back, and focus effort on those gaps in the right order.

After almost everything else they had tried had failed to make a meaningful difference, her maths test scores improved markedly. His daughter secured a place at one of London's long-established and highly regarded independent girls' schools, known for its distinguished history and strong academic record.

By then, Zafar had put considerable work into developing a systematic way of identifying and addressing the gaps that had been holding his daughter back. Once it had done what he originally created it to do, he did not want that work simply to disappear into a drawer. He wanted other parents facing the same frustrations to be able to use the same approach with their own children.

That became Penny Drop Maths.

Zafar read Economics at Cambridge University and spent a decade in investment banking at Salomon Brothers and N M Rothschild before moving into technology and entrepreneurship.

At Earthport, he instigated and drove the turnaround of the cross-border payments business, when it was valued at only a few hundred thousand pounds. Visa later acquired Earthport for £247 million. He has since spent more than two decades building, backing and leading technology and data-driven businesses.

Penny Drop Maths brings that experience in breaking down complex problems and building practical solutions to a problem he first encountered not in business, but in something far more difficult: being a parent.

LinkedIn: Zafar Karim

Dulan Dissanayake, Co-founder & CTO

Dulan Dissanayake turned Zafar's learning architecture and original working prototype into the robust technology platform behind Penny Drop Maths.

A senior software architect with more than 15 years' experience designing and building web, mobile and enterprise software across the UK, Singapore and Sri Lanka, his experience includes architecture work at Singapore Airlines and the BlockAPT cybersecurity platform.

At Penny Drop Maths, Dulan leads the technical architecture and engineering that bring the methodology to life, including the platform, skill-mapping technology, question delivery and personalised practice experience used by families today.

He holds a BSc (Hons) in Information Technology from the University of Moratuwa.

LinkedIn: Dulan Dissanayake

Get in touch

Questions, corrections and feedback go to support@pennydropmaths.co.uk — a person reads every message.