Maths

Mathematics at Fagley Primary School:

Children keep up, with no need to catch up

Intent

At Fagley Primary School, we create a maths culture that has fluency, reasoning and problem solving at its heart. We believe that every child can and will achieve. Children should keep up, not catch up.

Children will have a sound understanding of place value and calculations and be able to apply what they know in a range of contexts and make links across the curriculum as well as within their own everyday lives.

We want children and staff to have a genuine passion and curiosity for maths learning. We want children to embrace and enjoy their everyday application of mathematics.

Implementation

Maths lessons consist of a mastery approach which follows five key ideas:

1. Coherence: teaching is broken down into accessible, manageable steps which lead to a generalisation of the concept.

Each year group uses a well thought out yearly plan, which uses small connected steps to achieve the end of year objectives from the National Curriculum. A range of resources are available to teachers to ensure high quality maths teaching.

2. Representation and structure: representations used in lessons are carefully chosen and considered to emphasise and support the mathematics being taught.

Our calculation policy ensures representations are clear and progression shown. Materials and representations are expected to be used and modelled by the teacher in every year group.

3. Mathematical thinking: children are expected to be able to discuss their mathematical thinking, reason with and discuss with others.

Reasoning ladders and sentence stems ensure a consistent approach across all year groups and provide scaffolds for less confident children. Every child is given the opportunity to regularly reason about their mathematical thinking in meaningful ways.

4. Fluency: Facts and procedures should be able to be recalled and with the flexibility to transfer between various contexts and representations.

Maths Keys are planned across school with weekly lessons so the key fact is explicitly taught, children practise it and apply it in various ways. A number of online applications are used to allow children another way of practising and recalling key maths facts.

5. Variation: concepts are taught using many representations to develop a deep understanding.

A wide range of tasks are included within mathematics lessons, including outdoor sessions, using the ‘maths shack’ resources. Representations used are chosen carefully to build upon prior knowledge and to ensure progression.

Counting is an important element to Fagley mathematics lessons and children regularly count in a range of multiples in ascending and descending order.

Impact

We wish for children to be confident and successful mathematicians by enjoying their mathematics learning at Fagley Primary. They will be skilled and enthusiastic participants in lessons.

Children will make good progress, regardless of starting point, due to the sequence of teaching and scaffolds and support provided.