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The question library

See what your pupils are actually being asked, hide a question you disagree with, add your own worked method, and write questions of your own.

The short version Open Library from your student list. The first screen tells you what the common library actually contains, topic by topic. Click any topic to read its real questions — hide one, or write your own worked method. Press Publish to my students and it reaches their devices next time they open the app. To write your own question, use Your own questions; you'll be asked to answer it yourself first.

Reading the coverage screen

Every topic gets a row, sorted so the ones under most pressure sit at the top. Each row reads as a sentence rather than a table cell, because the point is to be acted on:

A typical row Prime Numbers — 20 questions, all one shape, no worked methods. Your pupils have answered this 60 times: about 3 sightings each.

Three figures matter, and the second is the one most people miss.

Figure	What it means	Why it matters
Questions	How many questions exist in that topic.	The obvious one, and the least useful on its own.
Shapes	How many genuinely different questions there are, once the numbers and names are stripped out.	This is the real measure. A topic with 25 questions that are all "Which word is closest in meaning to word?" teaches a pupil the pattern rather than the idea. Thirteen topics are currently a single shape.
Answers	How many times your pupils have answered anything in that topic.	Turns "thin" into "thin and being hammered" — which is where a question of your own does the most good.

Above the grid sit three ranked lists — thin and being practised, one shape only, and no worked method anywhere. They are the same data sorted by "where would ten minutes of your time go furthest".

What you won't find here No child's name, and no per-child figure, appears anywhere on this screen — only totals across all your pupils. That is structural rather than a policy: the underlying data has no per-child column at all, so a screen ranking one of your pupils against another can't be built by accident.

Hiding a question, or adding a worked method

Click a topic row to open its actual questions — the same ones a pupil is served, with the correct answer marked. Two things you can do to each:

Hide it

For a question you disagree with, that doesn't match how your pupils were taught, or that you simply don't rate. It stops appearing for your students only. Nobody else's library changes.

If hiding it would leave the topic with nothing at all, you'll be refused rather than warned — an empty topic breaks a pupil's session, so it isn't something to click past. Add a replacement first.
Add a worked method

Up to 600 characters explaining how to approach it. A pupil sees it when they get that question wrong, and Smarty Pants uses it as the basis for anything else it says — so they're guided by your method rather than a different one that contradicts you.

Worth knowing: none of the questions in the common library came with an explanation. Anywhere you add one is somewhere a pupil currently gets nothing.

Nothing reaches anyone until you publish Hides and worked methods save immediately, but your pupils keep seeing the old version until you press Publish to my students. Until then the screen says so — and it will still say so tomorrow, because it's worked out from your actual data rather than remembered by the page. After publishing, devices pick it up next time the app is opened.

Writing a question of your own

From the library screen choose Your own questions → Write a question. Pick a subject and topic, then one of two ways for a pupil to answer:

Pick from five options — multiple choice. Type five options and tick the correct one.
Type the answer — the pupil types a number or a word.

As you type, the panel underneath tells you anything worth knowing. Three levels: Needs fixing stops the question being sent; Worth a look is advice you can take or leave; Suggestion is a nudge, most often "you haven't written a worked method".

Typed answers are compared as text, not as numbers This catches people out, so the editor watches for it. Set the answer to 3.0 and a pupil who types 3 is marked wrong — they aren't the same piece of text. Same with £3 against 3, and .5 against 0.5. Whenever that would happen you're told, and told which alternative to add. Put it in the Also accept box, one per line, and the warning clears.

Drawing a picture for your question

Underneath the answer boxes sits Picture — "optional, drawn for the pupil". It starts on No picture, and most questions need nothing else. Choose a kind and you get one box for each thing that kind needs, with the drawing appearing beside them as you type.

There are 21 kinds, listed by name: clock, bar-chart, line-graph, pie-chart, number-line, polygon, coordinate-grid, shaded-grid, number-grid, measuring-scale (a jug or a thermometer), venn, compass, angles at a point or on a line, and the rest. Each asks only for what it needs: a clock wants an hour and a minute, a pie chart wants the labels and their percentages, a number line wants where it starts, where it ends and where the mark goes. Boxes that take a list say so underneath — "numbers separated by commas" — so you type 40, 25, 20, 15 the way you would write it.

The preview is the picture, not an impression of it What appears beside the boxes is drawn by the same code that draws it on a pupil's screen, so there is no second version to be surprised by. If it looks right there, that is what they get.

You are drawing the picture, not uploading one, and that is what makes it worth the couple of minutes: it stays sharp at any zoom on any tablet, it works in dark mode, it travels to a pupil who is offline, it adds almost nothing to what their device downloads, and it describes itself out loud to a pupil using a screen reader — a clock arrives as "a clock face showing 3 15" rather than as an image they cannot see. A photograph would fail every one of those.

A few things that same panel checks for you, because they are facts rather than opinions: a pie chart whose slices don't total 100%, and angles at a point or on a line that already add up to more than there is to go round. Everything else about a drawing is yours to look at — no automatic check can tell you that the shape you meant to draw is the shape a pupil will see, which is exactly what the preview is for.

One kind to leave alone for now grid-shapes-row — several shapes side by side on squared paper, the way a cube-nets question is printed — does not yet save the shapes you type into it. The boxes accept what you write and the shapes are dropped when the question is stored, so you would end up with an empty row and no warning. Every other kind saves what you enter.

The Answer Check

Before a question you've written can reach anybody, you answer it yourself. The options appear in a different order from the one you typed, on purpose.

That ordering is the whole point. Shown as you entered them, you'd be recognising "the one I ticked" rather than working the question out — which proves nothing about whether the answer is right. Shuffled, you have to actually do it. The correct answer is never sent to your browser at all, so there is nothing to look up.

This is the only step in the system that catches the one mistake nothing else can: a question typed perfectly with the wrong option ticked. Every automatic check can tell you a question is well formed. None of them can tell you it is right.

If you get it wrong You'll see: "That isn't the answer you saved. Have another look at the question — it's usually the answer key that's out, not you." That isn't politeness. When a tutor fails their own Answer Check, the overwhelmingly likely cause is that the wrong option got ticked when the question was typed. Go back, edit it, check again.

Editing a question always voids its check. Change the wording, the options, which one is correct, or the picture, and the question comes straight back out of your pupils' practice until you've answered it again. The picture counts because it often decides the answer: "what time is shown?" against a clock at 3:20 is a different question from the same words against a clock at 9:45. There is no way round that — it's enforced by the database itself, not by the screen — because "check it, then quietly change the answer" would make the whole thing meaningless.

What happens after you send it

A question you publish doesn't go straight into normal service. It's watched first.

Draft

Only you can see it. Nothing reaches a pupil from here.

With students

On trial. Appears in ordinary practice, at most once per session, and never in a mock exam — the mock is the score that matters most, so it gets proven questions only.

Settled in

Once twelve pupils have answered it and it is behaving like any other question. Now part of normal practice including mocks.

Paused

Withdrawn automatically because pupils were getting it wrong more often than guessing would produce. You're told why.

A pause is not a judgement on your pupils, and nothing about it is ever shown to a child — the question simply stops appearing. It means the question is doing something odd. Five options means a pupil who reads nothing and guesses gets about one in five right; a question scoring consistently below that isn't hard, it's steering people towards a wrong answer. Usually one of the other options reads as correct, or the question assumes a step your pupils haven't met yet.

It waits until it's sure Nothing is judged at all until eight pupils have answered, and even then only if the figures have put the matter beyond doubt: a question nobody is getting right is still left alone at ten answers, and is normally paused at around a dozen. A genuinely hard question can easily have a run of wrong answers early on, and pulling it on that basis would be wrong — so the rule asks "are we confident this is below guessing?" rather than "is the score low right now?". A hard-but-fair question is paused less than once in twenty times; one nobody can answer is caught every time.

Anything paused, along with anything you started and didn't finish, appears at the top of Your own questions. Edit a paused question and it becomes a draft again, ready to be checked and sent back out.

Checking a question that came from a paper

You may find questions in Your own questions that you did not write. Those have come from a past paper read into your library for you — reading a paper is done for you rather than from your console — and they sit in the same list, marked Draft.

They behave like your own in the way that matters most: no pupil sees one until you have passed its Answer Check. The row says "You haven't answered this one yourself yet" until you have. A question read off a page can be read wrong, and answering it yourself is the step that catches an answer key that doesn't match the question.

If it carries a picture, somebody has already sat with the original page open beside the drawing and confirmed the two say the same thing — that a shape with eight sides was drawn with eight sides, that a clock reading quarter past reads quarter past. That comparison is tied to that exact drawing.

Don't change the picture on an imported question Once the paper has been read, the scanned pages are deleted — so there is nothing left to compare a new drawing against, and the confirmation cannot be redone. Change the picture and the question will not go back out to your pupils, whatever you do next, and the message you get when you try won't explain why. If a picture looks wrong to you, use Retire and write your own version alongside it. Everything else — the wording, the options, the worked method — you can edit as normal, and then answer it again.

A handful of imported questions are built around a table of figures. Your screens don't show that table yet — the pupil's does — so if a question mentions data you cannot see, retire it rather than guess at the answer, and don't save an edit to it: the table is dropped when you do.

Questions people ask

Do my changes affect other tutors?: No. Hides, worked methods and your own questions are yours alone. The common library is never edited by anyone.
Can I edit one of the common library's questions directly?: No — you can hide it and write your own alongside it. That's deliberate: if the same question meant different things for different tutors, "which version did this pupil answer?" would stop having an answer, and their own history would become unreadable.
What happens to a question I retire?: It stops being served, but it is never deleted. Pupils who already answered it keep that in their history, which would otherwise develop unexplainable gaps. You can bring it back any time.
My pupil is offline. Do they still get my changes?: They keep practising from what their device already has, and pick your changes up next time they're online. A pupil who has never been enrolled with a tutor doesn't fetch anything at all — the app works with no account and no connection.
Will a change interrupt a test my pupil is halfway through?: Never. A session's questions are fixed the moment it starts. Anything you publish takes effect at their next home screen, so an hour-long mock can't lose a question at minute forty.
How many questions can I write?: Up to 300 of your own, and up to 500 worked methods. Both are far above realistic use; they exist to keep the download small on a pupil's tablet.
Can I put a picture on a question?: You can draw one, from 21 kinds — clocks, pie and bar charts, number lines, shapes, grids, jugs and thermometers, Venn diagrams and more — with a live preview of exactly what the pupil sees. See Drawing a picture for your question. What you cannot do is upload a photograph or a scan: a drawn picture stays sharp on any screen, works offline, and reads itself aloud to a pupil using a screen reader, and an uploaded image does none of that.
Why can't I write a comprehension passage?: Not built. A passage raises a copyright question rather than an engineering one, so it isn't something to add quietly.

One thing worth holding on to Everything on the coverage screen is a property of the library, never a report on you. "25 questions, all one shape" describes the questions, not your teaching — and it's shown at all only because a topic that's thin and being practised hard is the single most useful place a tutor can spend ten minutes.

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