Where our questions come from
Brainy Bees questions are a mix of our own original writing and openly licensed educational sources. Here's exactly where everything comes from.
Last updated: September 2026
UK Department for Education (Standards and Testing Agency)
Some of our maths and English questions (ages 6-7 and 10-11) are adapted from the 2024 national curriculum test papers. Contains material developed by the Standards and Testing Agency for 2024 national curriculum assessments and licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Brainy Bees
Most of our questions are written in-house by the Brainy Bees team, following UK national curriculum guidance for each age band. All rights reserved.
How we personalize your child's practice
Every practice attempt across every subject feeds one engine, not several separate ones. Here's exactly what it does today:
• Tracks real per-topic mastery using an Elo-style rating, not just a running percentage - so "good at fractions" actually reflects how they've done specifically on fractions questions, weighted by how hard each one was.
• Brings back topics before they fade. Each mastered topic gets a review date based on a forgetting-curve model, so it resurfaces right when your child's about to start forgetting it, not months later, and not never.
• Explains itself. Your dashboard shows the actual reason a question was chosen: because it's due for review, because it's a genuine weak spot, or because it's a confidence-building win they've already earned. Not just a score.
• Flags patterns, not just wrong answers. If the same kind of mistake keeps showing up (like confusing perimeter and area), it's tracked as a misconception in its own right, not just another wrong tally.
• Reaches into practice too. Arcade games and quick-practice modes read from the same mastery data, so a wobbly multiplication fact shows up more often in Honey Catch, not just in the next worksheet.
This page gets updated as the engine changes - if a claim here stops being accurate, we'll fix it rather than quietly leave it.