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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

What is ratio?

What is ratio?
We explain what ratio is and how children in KS2 are taught to solve problems involving ratio.

What is ratio?

A ratio compares values, telling us how much of one thing there is compared to another thing.

Children will start to learn about proportion and ratio in Year 6.

Solving ratio problems in KS2

Children in Year 6 may be asked to solve problems involving ratio. For example:

There are 20 children in a playground. The ratio of boys to girls is 2:8. How many boys are there in the playground?

The long way to work this out would be to draw a diagram of the 20 children, with one symbol (X) for boys and one symbol (0) for girls, for example:

X X 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

X X 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

They would be able to see from this diagram that there were four boys altogether.

For example, they might be shown the following diagram and would need to know that the ratio of blue shapes to pink shapes is three to four. They would need to know to write this as 3:4.

(Proportion is not the same thing as ratio, as it tells us about a number in relation to a whole, so in the case above we would say there are 4 pink shapes in every 7 shapes, or 3 blue shapes in every 7 shapes.)

Children then need to be able to move onto solving ratio problems using a quicker method. For example:

There are 48 beads in a jar. For every 2 purple beads there are 6 red beads. How many red beads are there altogether?

A quick way to work this out would be to:

  • Add the 2 and 6 together to make 8. If you then divide 48 by 8 you get 6.
  • To find out how many purple beads, you would multiply 2 by 6 = 12
  • To find out how many red beads, you would multiply 6 by 6 = 36

This can also be demonstrated like this:

Ratio problems can be presented in a number of different ways. These three problems all involve the same set of data:

There are 63 children in a playground. For every 2 children wearing black shoes there are 5 children wearing brown shoes. How many children are wearing black shoes?

There are 45 children in a playground wearing brown shoes. For every 5 children wearing brown shoes there are 2 wearing black shoes. How many children are wearing black shoes?

For every 2 children in a playground wearing black shoes there are 5 children wearing brown shoes. There are 18 children wearing black shoes. How many children are wearing brown shoes?

This data could be represented in the following way: