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TheSchoolRun.com closure date

As we informed you a few months ago, TheSchoolRun has had to make the difficult decision to close due to financial pressures and the company has now ceased trading. We had hoped to keep our content available through a partnership with another educational provider, but this provider has since withdrawn from the agreement.

As a result, we now have to permanently close TheSchoolRun.com. However, to give subscribers time to download any content they’d like to keep, we will keep the website open until 31st July 2025. After this date, the site will be taken down and there will be no further access to any resources. We strongly encourage you to download and save any resources you think you may want to use in the future.

In particular, we suggest downloading:

You should already have received 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep. If you haven’t received these, please contact us at [email protected] before 31st July 2025, and we will send them to you.

We are very sorry that there is no way to continue offering access to resources and sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused.

What is descending order?

What is descending order?
We explain what descending order means and give examples of how the concept might relate to numbers, decimals, fractions or amounts of money.

What is descending order?

When numbers are put in descending order, they are ordered from largest to smallest.

Children at primary school are usually required to order numbers from smallest to largest (in ascending order). They are not expected to know the terms 'ascending' or 'descending', however it may be useful for them to learn these terms.

Descending order: numbers, dates and letters

It is possible a child could be asked to order numbers from largest to smallest (descending order). This could be whole numbers, decimals, fractions or amounts of money.

For example:

Five children emptied their pockets of coins. These are the amounts of money each one had in their pockets: 67p  £1.85  99p  £2.17  38p

Write these amounts of money in order, from largest to smallest.

A child would be expected to re-order the amounts of money in this order: £2.17  £1.85  99p  67p   38p

If you are asked to put a list of dates in descending order, that would be from latest date to earliest date, so these dates:

3rd May 2013  4th January 2013 6th December 2013

would be changed into this order:

6th December 2013  3rd May 2013  4th January 2013

Descending order is also used for putting words into alphabetical order, although they go backwards, from Z to A, so these words:

lamb  bread courgettes  tomatoes

would go in this order:

tomatoes  lamb  courgettes  bread