Intent

When teaching mathematics at Perry Wood, we intend to provide a curriculum which caters for the needs of all individuals and sets them up with the necessary skills and knowledge for them to become successful in their future adventures. We aim to prepare them for a successful working life. We incorporate sustained levels of challenge through varied and high-quality activities with a focus on fluency, reasoning and problem-solving. Pupils are required to explore maths in depth, using mathematical vocabulary to reason and explain their workings. A wide range of mathematical resources are used and pupils are taught to show their workings in a concrete, pictorial and abstract form wherever suitable. They are taught to explain their choice of methods and develop their mathematical reasoning skills. We encourage resilience and acceptance that struggle is often a necessary step in learning. Our curriculum allows children to better make sense of the world around them relating the pattern between mathematics and everyday life.

Implementation

We implement our approach through high-quality teaching delivering appropriately challenging work for all individuals. To support us we have a range of mathematical resources in classrooms including Numicon, Base10 and Place Value counters. We have developed a small steps document that ensures the progression of skills across the school. Our lesson structures follow a model of Do it! Twist it! Deepen it! Which supports teaching for ‘mastery’ – teaching for ‘secure and deep understanding’ – approach. It embraces the core principles of Variation Theory by supporting teachers to design examples and exercises to secure and deepen understanding of mathematical ideas by highlighting essential features of a concept through the use of:

• What it is (standard)?
• What is it also (Non-standard)?
• What is it not (non-example)?
• Apply understanding to solve familiar and unfamiliar problems.

We use a range of resources to support planning including those provided by the White Rose Hubs, NCETM and NRICH. We continuously strive to better ourselves and frequently share ideas and things that have been particularly effective. We also take part in training opportunities both in school, as an academy trust and from outside agencies.
Through our teaching we continuously monitor pupils’ progress against expected attainment for their age, making formative assessment notes where appropriate and using these to inform our discussions in regular Pupil Progress Meetings and update our summative school tracker. The main purpose of all assessment is to always ensure that we are providing excellent provision for every child.

Impact

The Maths curriculum provides opportunities for all children to learn and develop knowledge and skills, including problem-solving and application. Through discussion and feedback, children talk enthusiastically about their maths lessons and speak about how they love learning maths. They can articulate the context in which maths is being taught and relate this to real-life purposes. Teachers plan a range of opportunities to use maths inside and outside the classroom, and throughout the curriculum.

• Pupils know how and why maths is used in the outside world and in the workplace. They know about different ways that maths can be used to support their future potential.
• Pupils use acquired vocabulary in maths lessons. They have the skills to use methods independently and show resilience when tackling problems.