At Ide Hill CE Primary, we believe that everyone can achieve and succeed in mathematics. Our inclusive curriculum, taught in a loving, structured, joyful and inclusive environment, ensures that every child can reach their full potential. Our aim is for children to leave as confident, skilled and resilient mathematicians who understand that mathematics is a fundamental part of everyday life and the world we live in. Our school values are interwoven through the curriculum: we look to promote a love of maths through engaging and consistently high standards of teaching and show respect and responsibility in our presentation in our subject.
We aim to provide children with a brave, broad and balanced maths curriculum, which offers opportunities for the practice and application of both arithmetic and reasoning skills to ensure children make good progress and become successful, confident mathematicians. By becoming curious learners, this allows the children to seek the abundant life that Jesus promises (John 10:10).
At Ide Hill CE Primary School, children should:
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be fluent in mental calculation skills related to their year group
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have the ability to apply fluent mental and arithmetic skills to reasoning and problem-solving tasks
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feel confident in their own mathematical ability
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develop independence
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have the ability to tackle problems logically
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link mathematical concepts together to support their understanding
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have a suitable technical vocabulary to articulate their responses
Teachers follow the 2014 National Curriculum programs of study for the teaching of mathematics and aims to excel in its three core areas:
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become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately
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reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language
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can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions
Each year group are taught to be fluent in the fundamental workings of the number system as this feeds into all number based work and wider problem solving activities.
As a school, we follow Primary Stars in EYFS and KS1 and White Rose Maths Scheme of Learning in KS2.
As a school, we chose to adopt these schemes as our maths curriculum as:
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It provides a powerful CPA approach (concrete, pictoral, then abstract) including in its use of models and images, which helps secure pupils understanding of mathematics and to make connections between different representations.
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There is a great emphasis on mathematical language, questioning, explaining, reasoning and problem solving. This allows pupils to discuss the mathematics they are doing, support each other to take ideas further, and develop a broad and secure understanding.
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It provides a connected, progressive curriculum, aiding the development of carefully sequenced lessons.
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The curriculum is designed to use skills that have already been learnt in different contexts whenever possible. This helps pupils to remember and to make connections between different parts of the curriculum.
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It combines the best of both ‘mastery’ and ‘spiral’ approaches in the curriculum. It 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.
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It is a curriculum that is ambitious and that works for all, with everybody studying the same topic and being provided with support and challenge as needed. Many of the teaching strategies we advocate for all pupils are particularly useful for pupils with SEND, showing the caring and nurturing approach we deliver across our whole curriculum.
The teachers will follow the following sequence when introducing a new concept:
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Concrete – children should have the opportunity to use concrete objects and manipulatives to help them to understand what they are doing
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Pictorial – children should add pictorial representations alongside their concrete work. These can then be used to help reason and problem solve.
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Abstract – moving from the concrete and pictorial to the abstract and being able to solve problems in a more abstract way.
Mathematical talk – using questions to introduce a concept to the children – will be used at the start of each small step of learning. There will then follow a series of tasks and activities through direct teaching, guided teaching or independent working to allow children opportunities to explore the concept and demonstrate their understanding. Children will have access to apparatus to support their learning as required. Teachers will use resources from the websites and published schemes as noted above. The tasks will move from varied fluency to reasoning and problem solving
Teaching resources available for use in all classrooms range from simple counters, an array of sorting materials, Numicon, Dienes and access to e-learning on laptops and iPads. Children are given the opportunity to learn outdoors when the context allows for it, leading to seeing maths in a real-life experience.
Impact on learning within the lesson is assessed using focused questioning and observations with feedback provided to pupils at the point of teaching. Professional discussions with teaching assistants, marking, pupil discussions and continuous assessment help to inform pupil's next steps in learning.
As a school, we strive to allow our pupils to access the end of unit White Rose assessments. These can also be used as a pre-unit assessment by teachers to identify potential gaps of individuals or classes. Each class teacher then collects this information, allowing for an overview of the class and of individuals strengths and weaknesses. This can then be used to inform practice within that academic year, as well as for future teachers as a snapshot of their new class. As well as this, we assess long-term memory by assessing at the end of autumn, spring and summer to allow us to ensure knowledge has been retained by our pupils. This helps to then inform a stronger and more robust teacher assessment.