“Go deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.”

Dean Schlieter

Mathematics Curriculum Statement

Intent

At St John the Baptist, we take a mastery approach to the teaching and learning of mathematics. Essentially, our ethos is that all children can be successful in the study of mathematics. We do not accept that ‘some children cannot do maths’ or that children should be limited by prior attainment; maths is for everyone. We teach the skills to ensure our children are resilient learners who become life-long mathematicians. We aim to deliver an inspiring and engaging maths curriculum through high quality teaching.

Implementation

Maths in Early Years

Our EYFS at St John’s provides an engaging and encouraging climate for children’s early encounters with mathematics. This develops their confidence and their ability to understand and use maths and is the foundation for their future maths learning.

We are passionate about the teaching of early mathematics. We actively introduce mathematical concepts, methods, and language through a variety of engaging and stimulating practical experiences, both within the classroom and in the outside environment. We guide children to see connections of ideas within maths as well as with other subjects, developing their mathematical knowledge throughout the day and across the curriculum. We encourage children to communicate, explaining their thinking as they interact with maths in a deep and sustained way.

We ensure that children have sufficient practice to be confident in using and understanding numbers which provides a strong basis for more complex learning later on. Focus is placed on the use of concrete resources to develop deep structural knowledge and the ability to make connections, with the aim of ensuring that what is learnt is sustained over time.

Maths in Years 1-6

We are committed to ensuring that all children are mathematically proficient and confident in the use of maths in their everyday lives. To achieve this, we teach for maths mastery designed to ensure all children develop a deep and sustainable understanding of age-appropriate mathematical concepts, which can be built upon in the future. We believe that every child can achieve and encourage the growth mindset ‘can do’ attitude. Pupils learn to think mathematically to find patterns, connections and relationships between different concepts.

Building on relevant educational research, our maths curriculum has been responsive to the concept of retrieval practice and we understand that children need regular opportunities to revisit prior learning in order to commit mathematical understanding to long term memory.

We teach maths based on the White Rose Maths planning, adapted to meet the needs of our children. It is a small-steps approach, which means the concepts are broken down to enable the children to acquire a deep, long-term, secure and adaptable understanding. It has been designed to support and challenge all pupils, and is built on the belief that everyone can learn maths successfully, by building number fluency, confidence and understanding, step by step. By taking a Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract (CPA) approach, our curriculum allows children to tackle concepts in a tangible and accessible way. All ideas are built on previous knowledge and pupils have lots of opportunity to recognise relationships between topics.

Fluency comes from deep knowledge and practise. At early stages, explicit teaching of multiplication tables is important in the journey towards fluency and contributes to quick and efficient mental calculation. We teach multiplication both through progressive teaching sequences and through multiplication chanting and recall of the times tables appropriate for each year group. At St John’s we teach multiplication tables in the following year groups so that children are proficient in the rapid recall of all multiplication tables up to 12×12 by the end of Year 4

– Year 2: 2s, 5s and 10s

– Year 3: 3s, 4s and 8s

– Year 4: 6s, 7s, 9s, 11s and 12s.

We also use Times Tables Rockstars as a tool to help pupils develop fluency in number facts and multiplication tables in school and at home.

Each half term children are given Key Instant Recall Facts (KIRFs) to practise and learn at home. We expect the majority of the children within a year group to be working towards these targets. It is important that children know these thoroughly and are able to recall the facts instantly for their year group. By helping to develop these skills, the children will be more able to access other areas of the maths curriculum such as calculation methods, problem solving and reasoning.

Impact

When we plan our lessons and sequences of lessons we structure the learning so that all pupils work through new content together as a whole group. We adapt our lessons to enable all children to make progress and this is evident in the questioning and scaffolding that individual children receive in class. Teachers allow time for children to fully understand, explore and apply ideas, rather than accelerate through new topics. Pupils’ difficulties and misconceptions are identified through immediate formative assessment and addressed with rapid intervention. This approach enables pupils to truly grasp a concept.

How we assess:

There is an end of unit check for each WRM unit which assesses the understanding of the children for that unit.

At the end of every half-term we carry out summative assessment using the Star Maths online assessments (Y3-6) and at the end of each term we use the WRM assessments (Y1-6). This enables the curriculum planning to be adapted to meet the needs of our children.

Please click the links below for:

• the long term plans for each year group
• the calculation policies
• a leaflet about the mastery approach
• the expected vocabulary in each year group
• the KIRFs overview
• details of the Y4 Multipication Tables Check (MTC)