Six-year-olds know multiplication?
We don't live in the UK but our kids watch Numberblocks.
Our youngest started rattling off all kinds of number stuff which I know for sure she hasn't yet encountered in school.
Me: Wow ... how do you know that?
Her: Numberblocks!
Me: Umm ... OK!
> Numberwang theme tune
I do though. I still blow minds when I put my iPhone calculator in scientific mode. Math education is important for many reasons. But teaching it as a practical survival skill using no tools does a disservice to the student. Either it is useful as a problem solving exercise or it is a practical skill that should take advantage of tools. "Just memorize this stuff" isn't useful because it backfires into hating learning. Nothing about math makes it ideal for memorization and none of my math teachers spent any time on study skills.
Making a subject "fun" is alright, but making it entertaining (IME) makes for more productive engagement.
By age 6 to 7 they're expected to understand that addition and multiplication are commutative, while subtraction and division are not.
My experience, ultimately, was much less ... 'high-quality', let's say. When I left the Montessori school (by 3rd grade), I learned practically no math from then until after high school. First, in normal 'elementary' school (US), multiplication was still being covered in 6th grade. Then, suddenly (from my perspective), letters were being brought into the picture in 7th or 8th grade. So, in my arc, math started to not make sense, at all.
From my perspective, we had spent multiple years on multiplication and long division, which I already understood very well by the end of 2nd grade ... so, there was the period where I basically didn't learn anything, where it seemed like we'd reached the end of math or something. Or, perhaps, like there were some sort of subtleties remaining in multiplication and division. It just gave me a chance to be bored with all of it, boredom correlates heavily with mistakes with kids with attention issues (IMO), this fed into some sort of doubts about my understanding of everything etc., and then, suddenly, there was new material again starting in 7th grade. Material that was 'mechanical', and that didn't seem to have explanations I could understand.
Ultimately, I struggled along with that garbage through high school, then, after, took a course where we actually did PROOFS. Basic number theory stuff - modular arithmetic, etc. Bam, suddenly, the subject started to make sense.
Typing this out actually makes me slightly angry. I'm not sure I previously connected it all together - why I had so much trouble with math for some years ... how this 'arc' was pretty much perfectly engineered to make math a problem, for me. In any case, schooling through high school can be a really low quality experience at times - for some students, subjects, etc. The math curricula, methods of teaching, and progression I was exposed to, worked together, in some sense, to make the subject a problem for me. To do almost the opposite of what was intended - to pretty well impede learning. There's no one factor in that story I can point to and say 'here, fix this' ... no one involved in the story was actively attempting to do anything other than what they thought was best or what they were required to do, but, the net result was honestly worse - I now believe (and believed some years ago, even without quite this analysis) - than if I'd just been given some selection of math material to pick from and been allowed some sort of semi-self directed coursework.
Even better, though, if I'd simply had that course with proofs / basic number theory in, say, 8th grade ... guh, would have avoided so much pain, I'm pretty sure...