The Mathematics Curriculum

At Tyldesley Primary School, we believe that maths is a fundamental corner stone of our curriculum and is designed to engage and captivate pupils whilst providing them with the mathematical skills that are needed for the next stage in their educational journey and for later life.  We want our pupils to be confident mathematicians that are fluent, can reason and solve problems with a secure understanding across concrete, pictorial and abstract methods of maths.   

Our maths curriculum provides opportunities to connect, consolidate and reinforce maths skills whilst also developing fluency in both arithmetic and times tables to allow pupils to be able to access all areas of learning within mathematics.  Key instant recall facts and concepts for each year group are carefully sequenced and mapped for each half term. 

To ensure that all pupils reach their full potential, their individual needs and abilities are recognised and developed within a caring and supportive environment. This journey begins in Early Years and is achieved through providing stimulating practical investigations, real world projects, role play areas and problem solving across the curriculum to ensure the very best start to pupil’s understanding of mathematical concepts and development of mathematic skills.  This fundamental start to a pupil’s mathematical journey enables all pupils to have access to a full curriculum as they move up throughout school which enables them to achieve confidence and competence or in other words, ‘mastery’, in maths.  This mastery approach to mathematics means that pupils need to develop three forms of knowledge:

• Fluency (Factual) I know that…
• Problem Solving (Procedural) I know how…
• Reasoning (Conceptual) I know why…

Implementation

To meet our curriculum aims for maths, teachers will deliver lessons which are coherently planned and sequenced to ensure cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for future learning.

The aims of the National Curriculum are to develop fluency and the ability to reason mathematically and solve problems.

Teachers use the White Rose Maths schemes of learning as the basis of their planning whilst using their professional judgement to adapt these to meet the needs of their class.

The schemes of learning include:

• Yearly Overview: this is a year plan for each year group from Year 1 to Year 6 where each term is split into twelve weeks. These are then divided into blocks of learning (eg Place Value, Geometry) with a significant amount of time devoted to developing key number concepts each year. This is to build fluency and number sense; both will affect their success in other areas of mathematics. 
• Termly Overview: these indicate the objectives (the age-related expectations, or AREs) that will be covered within each block. 
• Small Steps Guidance: each objective is then broken down into smaller steps to provide a coherent journey through the block. These small steps typically become daily maths lessons. However, teachers are encouraged to use their professional judgement to re-order, adapt, extend or shorten where necessary to meet the needs of the individual class.   Each ‘Small Step’ includes notes and guidance to help to focus on key points for teaching; questions to promote mathematical talk; examples of varied fluency; and suggestions for problem-solving and reasoning. 

We supplement White Rose Maths materials with resources such as URBrainy, Classroom Secrets, NCETM Teaching for Mastery year group documents and PIXL resources to allow teachers to provide more examples of fluency activities and to give further opportunities for pupils to reason and apply their mathematical understanding using problem-solving tasks.   

Impact

Our well-planned maths curriculum ensures that pupils are fluent and confident mathematicians, who exude an enjoyment and curiosity about the subject. Our pupils are enthusiastic and competent mathematical problem solvers, within maths lessons and across the curriculum. Pupils perform consistently well in mathematics and are very well prepared for the next stage in their education.

We gather this evidence through a variety of scrutiny: pupil voice, lesson visits and pupil outcomes in books.  We use summative assessment data from statutory tests (SATs; Year 4 MTC), end of year assessments and White Rose Maths termly assessments as well as on-going teacher assessment to make judgments about attainment and progress within the maths curriculum.    

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