Children to be marked up for using long division in maths Ministers have already announced that calculators will be banned in maths tests sat by 11-year-olds at the end of primary school. Elizabeth Truss, the Education Minister, will outline the plans in a speech to the North of England Education Conference in Sheffield on Thursday. Speaking before the address, she said: "Chunking and gridding are tortured techniques but they have become the norm in recent years. Children just end up repeatedly adding or subtracting numbers, and batches of numbers. They may give the right answer but they are not quick, efficient methods, nor are they methods children can build on, and apply to more complicated problems. Column methods of addition and subtraction, short and long multiplication and division are far simpler, far quicker, far more effective and allow children to understand properly the calculation and therefore move on to more advanced problems. The draft national curriculum for primary maths - published last year - specifies that children should learn "efficient calculation methods," such as short and long multiplication and division. There is no reference in the draft to "chunking" and "gridding," in which pupils work out problems by splitting numbers into smaller units. The draft curriculum also says that nine-year-olds should know all their times tables up to 12x12 and confidently work with numbers up to 10 million by the end of primary school. Currently, children only need to know up to 10x10 and familiarise themselves with numbers below 1,000 by the age of 11.