Subject Leader  - Miss McGlynn

Link Governor - All Governors

Maths Policy

Maths Overview Year 1

Maths Overview Year 2

Maths Overview Year 3

Maths Overview Year 4

Maths Overview Year 5

Maths Overview Year 6

Intent

Our aim is to provide every child at The Priory Primary School with the opportunity to achieve in Mathematics. Our Mathematics curriculum follows the Teaching for Mastery Model, this pedagogical approach was chosen to ensure a positive culture was created around Mathematics. It is also underpinned by a ‘Can do’ approach where children are given the scaffolding and support to enable them to achieve, alongside their peers. We aim to provide children with essential number skills to help them succeed in the world and deepen their understanding of mathematical concepts through reasoning and problem-solving.

The use of the DfE-approved textbook ‘Power Maths provides teachers with carefully designed lessons, that include the coherence and variation required to provide opportunities for intelligent practice ensuring pupils develop procedural and conceptual understanding in tandem. This model allows the whole class to move forward together with their learning, developing mathematical thinking and fluency, using representations and structures. A ‘Block Learning’ approach allows us to spend a significant amount of time on each concept to ensure pupils develop a deep understanding of the key ideas, which build on from previous years and provide the platform for future learning.
 

Curriculum Drivers

Aspirations:

• Our Maths lessons are planned around the ideology that all our pupils will be able to achieve within Maths.
• We enrich all curriculum areas, including Maths, by exposing children to real-life situations where a good understanding of mathematical concepts is important.
• We aim to inspire our children to leave primary school with a love of maths and a desire to want to study it at secondary school and at university.

Awe and Wonder:

• Pupils should enjoy what they are learning, our maths lessons are designed to foster curiosity through real-life problems and a teaching for mastery pedagogy. Teachers have the skills and understanding to showcase how maths can be exciting and relevant in the real world.
• We also encourage children to ask questions and to seek answers using manipulatives and scaffolds.
• High-quality resources are created and used within each topic area to inspire children.

Experiential learning:  

• Our maths curriculum is designed to encourage children to make links between mathematical concepts and to explore patterns in Maths.
• We aim to provide children with a range of resources, pictorial representations, and abstract methods allowing them to enjoy challenging mathematical concepts.
• We believe in the use of open-ended and investigative questions that encourage children to experiment with mathematical concepts.
• Within the Early Years classrooms, maths is taught through experiential learning. Children use their past experiences and the world around them to explore and learn about numbers.

Language and oracy:

• Explicit vocabulary and sentence stems are used as a scaffold throughout our maths curriculum, allowing children to communicate their ideas with growing articulacy. They provide a framework to embed conceptual knowledge and build understanding.
• Throughout all Key Stages and units of learning, key vocabulary is chosen, and the morphology of words discussed widely to ensure that pupils have the knowledge to grasp new concepts based on prior learning.
• To further encourage the use of higher-order vocabulary, our curriculum provides an opportunity for rich dialogue through Philosophy for Children (P4C).
• Our Maths lessons are designed to encourage children to talk. Each lesson begins with a picture that all children should be able to discuss and make links to.
• Children are seated in mixed-ability grouping to help enrich and diversify the language of all our children.
• Children are encouraged to talk through mathematical concepts with their peers. ‘Three before me’ is used across the school so that children help one another which in turn allows children to be better at explaining their methods in more than one way.

Cultural Heritage:

Our Maths Curriculum encourages the teaching of our cultural heritage by

• Providing children with the opportunities to link their Maths learning to their own cultural experiences which in turn develops their belief of being capable of learning in Maths.
• Throughout our Maths curriculum, we discuss and identify how other cultures have contributed to our understanding of Maths and how we, as lifelong learners, can add to this.
• Mathematics also provides the foundational knowledge and skills for other subjects such as Science, Art, and DT – which again allows us to make links to our own (and other's) cultural heritage.