Maths
Intent
At Ss Peter and Paul’s, we believe that through consistency in approach, our pupils should be stretched and challenged in order to love Maths. In order to successfully deliver a structured, rich curriculum with a clear progression of skills and knowledge, we follow the National Curriculum for Mathematics.
Our approach to teaching mathematics is intended to support all of our children in becoming young, confident mathematicians; prepare them for their next stage of mathematical learning at secondary school, and to be able to apply their mathematical knowledge in everyday situations in order to be successful in life beyond school. We intend to do this, on a daily basis, through developing all children’s fluency in all areas of the mathematics national curriculum; providing opportunities to reason mathematically; and also develop children’s using and applying skills when solving increasingly more complex problems involving a range of mathematical knowledge.
Implementation
Classroom Organisation
We teach Maths as whole class lessons, so that all children have access to the age-related skills and knowledge contained in the National Curriculum.
Mathematics is taught on a daily basis throughout the school – EYFS to Year 6. Each class in KS1 and KS2 provide a minimum of 1 hour of mathematics per day and this must be taught period 1. Within lessons, teachers and teaching assistants target support to enable all learners to achieve at an age-related level wherever possible. This may involve a greater level of modelling or use of manipulatives (cubes, counters etc). Pupils are given opportunities to extend their knowledge through extension tasks.
Regular opportunities are given for pupils to work collaboratively through ‘talking time’ tasks. Pupils are regularly given instant feedback through teacher 'live ' marking or self marking – allowing misconceptions to be dealt with promptly.
Intervention and Support
In class-support is through our implementation of Quality First Teaching. Quality First Teaching is a style of teaching that emphasises high quality, inclusive teaching for all pupils in a class. Quality first teaching includes adapted learning, strategies to support SEN pupils’ learning in class, on-going formative assessment and many others.
Each classroom has a ‘Maths working wall’ display in order to provide key vocabulary and information with modelled examples to support learning.
CPA approach
At Ss Peter and Paul’s we use the CPA approach to support the teaching and learning of the four methods of four written calculation methods.
The Concrete Pictorial Abstract (CPA) approach is a system of learning that uses physical and visual aids to build a child’s understanding of abstract topics.
Pupils are introduced to a new mathematical concept through the use of concrete resources (e.g. fruit, Dienes blocks etc). When they are comfortable solving problems with physical aids, they are given problems with pictures – usually pictorial representations of the concrete objects they were using.
Then they are asked to solve problems where they only have the abstract i.e. numbers or other symbols. Building these steps across a lesson can help pupils better understand the relationship between numbers and the real world, and therefore helps secure their understanding of the mathematical concept they are learning.
Impact
Our teaching of, and curriculum for, mathematics will lead to greater progress over time across all key stages relative to each individual child’s starting point. It is designed to prepare children for their future in and outside of education so they can become successful in whatever they pursue by leaving our school at least at the expected standard for their age. Our rich and broad mathematics curriculum aims to make the children enthusiastic about learning mathematics and gain an understanding of its importance in everyday life.
The % of pupils working at ARE and Greater depth within each year group will be at least in line with national averages. There will be no significant gaps in the progress of different groups of pupils (e.g. disadvantaged vs non-disadvantaged).
