The short answer
What does a child learn in Year 6 maths?
In Year 6, children in England work across ten areas of maths: number and place value, the four operations, fractions, decimals and percentages, ratio and proportion, algebra, measurement, geometry (shape, and position and direction) and statistics. Most of it is not brand new — it is earlier maths taken further, with the expectation that a child can now choose a method, work through several steps, and explain why the answer is sensible.
Three things genuinely arrive in Year 6: algebra, ratio and proportion, and long division. Everything else — fractions, decimals, percentages, area, coordinates, data — is a harder version of Year 5. That matters, because when a Year 6 child struggles it is usually not the Year 6 content that has failed. It is a Year 4 or Year 5 idea underneath it that never quite settled.
The programme of study itself groups these under nine headings — fractions, decimals and percentages sit together under one, and geometry is split into shape and into position and direction. We have separated them below because that is how parents look for them, not because the curriculum is written that way.
The national curriculum sets out the Year 6 content, but schools are only required to have taught the Year 5 and Year 6 programmes of study by the end of key stage 2 — not by the end of each year. It does not set out the order either: schools sequence the content themselves, often following a published scheme, so two children in the same year group at different schools can meet ratio in November and in March. If your child has not covered something yet, that is normal and not a sign of falling behind.
Source for everything below: the Year 6 programme of study in the national curriculum for England, published by the Department for Education. We have kept to what it actually requires rather than what tutoring sites tend to list.