Intent

At Petham Primary School, it is our intent to provide children with a high-quality, broad and challenging maths curriculum. We want children to become fluent in the fundamental skills of maths. We intend to achieve this by developing an ability to rapidly recall and apply their developing knowledge with accuracy. We want every child to be able to reason successfully, at their level, by justifying and making links between concepts using high quality mathematical vocabulary. Also, we enable children to access regular opportunities to apply mathematical knowledge and understanding right across our wider curriculum. 

We want the children to see that maths is an interconnected subject, to make connections across the different areas to develop their fluency. This is why we have adopted the mastery approach to teaching and learning maths. The idea is introduced in EYFS, developed through the White Rose scheme of learning from EYFS to Year 6. At the same time, we unlock a passion for the subject, motivating the children to learn; encouraging them to believe that they can and will achieve in maths; and produce lifelong learners of the subject. 

Implementation

Teachers develop their lesson planning using the White Rose scheme's mixed age long term planning. This can be found here by using the filter. Each lesson begins with a flash back 4 to support retrieval of previously taught concepts. 

To further support mental dexterity with numbers we learn number facts, and put to the test weekly in every class when children participate in 'Big Maths Beat That' from Year 1 to Year 6 and in EYFS from the summer term. 

Outside of the daily maths lessons, children complete their daily 'Fantastic 5' across Key Stage Two classes. The purpose, to support retrieval by allowing children to regularly practise and apply methods for the four main operations - addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. In addition to this, teachers carefully deploy their 'Fantastic 5' each morning purposely, to target any gaps in understanding to enable rapid progress.  

As always, our core school values will be seen through the subject. Pupils will be encouraged to demonstrate leadership frequently by recognising that they themselves lead their own success by being resilient to challenge in every lesson. Children will learn the importance of organisation when tackling a range of problems throughout the curriculum, thinking and retrieving taught strategies. Children learn how initiative is key, they will be taught and reminded about strategies and resources they can drawn upon at any time throughout the curriculum to aid their own understanding. 

Impact

The impact of the curriculum design is to ensure that all pupils will be able to acquire the appropriate age related knowledge linked to the maths curriculum and real life.  As they progress through the school years, the maths lessons will equip the children to progress from their starting points and within their everyday lives to a point where they become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, can reason and follow a line of enquiry and can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions

Through various experiences such as maths week initiatives as well as interactions with maths expert and secondary colleagues, our curriculum will lead pupils to be enthusiastic mathematic learners.

Useful maths websites and games