Frequently asked questions

EMP is designed as a Tier 1 program (60 minutes a day, five days a week), and its Daily Review & Quick Teach (DRQT) routines are core to how it works, providing the consolidation and pre-teaching students need between lessons. Skipping these to run EMP as a standalone Tier 2 or 3 intervention significantly undermines student success.

If your school isn’t yet running EMP at Tier 1, the best approach is to advocate for that first, then add tutoring or small-group support alongside it for extra dosage, not instead of it.

Within a Tier 1 classroom, EMP already includes tools for students who need more support: Number Bond & Factor Tree Fact Support Sheets, Scaffolded Fluency Practice, and Bridging Courses (Levels B and C) for students with significant foundational gaps. Full guides for all of these are on the EMP Resource Hub.

A full year of scripted, sequenced daily lessons, daily reviews, worked examples and teaching notes — everything needed to deliver the lesson.

Currently available: Level A (Foundation), Level B (Year 1), Level C (Year 2, plus most of Year 3), and Level D (Year 3, plus 75% curriculum coverage for Year 4), so students are often accessing content above their nominal year level even at the current levels.

Coming soon: Level E (Year 4, 2027), with levels for Years 5 and 6 to follow, one per year, after that. The full F–6 program will be available at the start of 2029.

Plenty of schools, including very small ones, run EMP successfully in composite and multi-age classes. A few things help:

• Run EMP placement assessments before purchasing, so you can group students by mathematical readiness rather than year level.
• Stream students by EMP level across composite classes, rather than teaching two year levels side by side; it makes implementation far more manageable.
• Use the Extension Curriculum Tables to see how each level reaches into content from the year above, which helps composite teachers understand what students at different levels are accessing.

For more detail: our composite classes page, or Episode 4 of our Small Schools podcast, featuring a principal from a 32-student school on how they made it work.

Pricing depends on your school’s numbers: student count, levels needed, and order size all factor in. Use our Quote Builder to get an accurate, itemised quote for your school in a few minutes. Shipping is calculated separately based on order size and destination.

Set aside about 2.5 hours with your staff to work through the EMP Guide to Success, our online video PD course, before lessons begin. It’s built into every Teacher Lesson Book and free on the Resource Hub, and covers:

• Why the EMP (20 mins)
• How to use the EMP (30 mins)
• Running a DRQT (20 mins, with level-specific examples)
• Running a Lesson (35 mins, including rehearsal; don’t skip this part)
• Mastering the EMP (5 mins)

It can be done as a full-staff session or in pairs. For extra support, we also run in-person PD intensives throughout the year: see our upcoming In-person PD page for dates near you, or we can arrange a full-day on-site training with one of our facilitators; get in touch for details.

Manipulatives are used throughout EMP, particularly for place value, addition and subtraction with grouping, and the split strategy, but only where they genuinely support conceptual understanding, not where they’d add unnecessary cognitive load.

A full list of required manipulatives and hands-on resources for each level is available here. Examples include bundling sticks (Foundation), place value materials, mini-whiteboards and markers (used across all levels for DRQTs), and number lines/hundreds charts.

We also recommend students use NumBots and Times Tables Rock Stars at home for extra fluency practice, especially if their fluency is still developing.