Maths

Next Previous

MATHS CURRICULUM

AIMS:

At St Mary’s, we believe maths is an important part of a child’s development throughout school. We intend on delivering a curriculum which allows children to be part of a creative and engaging lessons that will give them a range of opportunities to explore maths following a mastery approach that will give each child a chance to believe in themselves as mathematicians and develop the power of resilience and perseverance when faced with mathematical challenges. We’re building a whole culture of deep understanding, confidence and competence in maths – a culture that produces strong, secure learning and real progress. We foster positive ‘can do’ attitudes and we promote the fact that ‘We can all do Maths’. We use mistakes and misconceptions as an essential part of learning and provide challenge.

We aim for all children to:

Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics so that they develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.
Be able to solve problems by applying the mathematics to a variety of problems with increasing sophistication, including in unfamiliar contexts and real-life scenarios.
Reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry and develop and present a justification, argument or proof using mathematical language.
Make rich connections across mathematical ideas to develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and competence in solving increasingly sophisticated problems.
Have an appreciation of number and number operations, which enables mental calculations and written procedures to be performed efficiently, fluently and accurately to be successful in mathematics.

APPROACH:

How is our curriculum sequenced (and why was it sequenced this way)?

The fundamental idea behind The White Rose Hub curriculum design is to support pupils to be able to perform simpler tasks so they can then move on to perform more complex tasks. This thinking gives rise to a typical sequence of ‘blocks’ of mathematics. Within each of these blocks, there are ‘small steps’ which are again sequenced in order of difficulty and dependency. Each step builds carefully from the previous step, building on pupils’ prior knowledge to develop new skills, with nothing left out. Each block starts with a review.

It is a combination of the best of both ‘mastery’ and ‘spiral’ approaches in our curriculum. It certainly follows many of the mastery principles – spending longer on topics to help gain deeper understanding, making connections, keeping the class working together on the same topic and a fundamental belief that, through effort, all pupils are capable of understanding, doing and improving at mathematics. But we also recognise that just spending a good chunk of time on a topic doesn’t mean that all pupils will ‘master’ it the first time they see it, and that they need to see it again and again in different contexts and in different years to help them truly develop their understanding on their journey to mastery, so we’ve built in the revisiting and reinforcing features of spiral curricula too.

Fluency, Reasoning and Problem Solving. These key components of learning mathematics are included in all our small steps. We certainly don’t advocate that all the fluency in a block is done first, then the reasoning and then the problem solving. We believe these should be integrated into classroom practice as much as possible in the order that is appropriate for the step.

COVERAGE AND PROGRESSION:

To view the Maths coverage map and progression of skills, please see our curriculum document 2020/21, which may be accessed via the PDF link below.

SUBJECT POLICY:

Our Maths Policy is to be found via this link: School Policies

Ely St Mary's Curriculum Information 21.22.pdf