Our Mathematics teaching implements the objectives of the National Curriculum through a daily maths lesson.  The main areas of Mathematics taught are number (including calculation), geometry, measurement and statistics.

   We want children to leave our school as competent, independent and enthusiastic mathematicians. We have therefore adopted a mastery approach to our whole class teaching with the aim of developing children’s conceptual understanding, fluency, reasoning and problem solving skills. We aim for each child to master each area of the curriculum as it is taught, allowing the whole class to move forwards in their mathematical learning together. Mastery is achieved through initially building children’s understanding up through using a range of models and images to represent the concepts and bring the ideas to life. Children are challenged to apply what they know through problem solving and reasoning opportunities.

   Building number fluency is an important element of our mathematics teaching and we provide lots of opportunities for children to improve the speed with which they can recall number facts, such as number bonds and times tables facts, and to develop their mental calculation skills.  This will ensure that they are able to apply these skills quickly when completing more complex calculations. 

   Whenever possible, the daily mathematics lesson will contain the five elements of mastery – representation and structure, small steps, fluency, mathematical thinking and variation.  Teaching each National Curriculum objective through a series of small steps, either within a lesson or across a series of lessons, allows children to build a secure understanding of key concepts and skills. 

   We encourage children across all year groups to use practical equipment to develop and consolidate their mathematical understanding, which will allow them to move easily between concrete, pictorial and abstract representations of mathematics. 

   Each class teacher plans their own units of work and is responsible for ensuring that over the course of the year, each child covers their year groups’ mathematics objectives from the National Curriculum.