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 a mastery approach to the teaching and learning of 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. Our current 2024-2025 sequence of learning is available further down this page. Our mastery approach to the teaching of maths places an emphasis on retrieval practice to ensure that pupils retain skills, knowledge and vocabulary in the long-term memory. Our curriculum is mapped following the National Curriculum elements of Place Value, Number, Fractions, Measure and Geometry.

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 about and retrieving known 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.

Key Stage One and Two Maths Outcomes

Multiplication Check for Year 4 Pupils

During term 6 (June) of each academic year, all pupils in year 4 will take part in a statutory assessment designed to assess multiplication competency. This assessment is call the Multiplication Check. During this assessment, pupils will face 25 random multiplication questions, covering all 12 times tables. Pupils will have 6 seconds to determine the answer and type it into the platform.

How do we prepare our pupils:

• A weekly times table session in Years 3 & 4 with a targeted weekly focus aimed to develop pupils' knowledge of all 12 times tables progressively.
• Regular opportunity to use and apply known times tables through Emile battles and challenges.
• Regular access to digit platforms, aimed to emulate the experience of the official check.

How parents & carers can support:

• Continuing to practice times tables at home, by accessing the weekly focus document to find out the current priority times table. 
• Accessing Emile at home to practice multiplication in a fun and engaging way.
• Accessing the practice multiplication check platform, made available by Maths Frame, click here.

Further information is available for parents & carers by clicking here.

Useful maths websites and games