Mathematics
Intent
When teaching Mathematics at Barry Primary School, 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 positive working life. We incorporate sustained levels of challenge through varied and high-quality activities with a focus on fluency, reasoning and problem solving.
We intend for our children to explore Maths in depth, using mathematical vocabulary to reason and explain their workings. Our expectation is for them to explain their choice of methods and develop their mathematical reasoning skills. We encourage resilience, adaptability and acceptance that struggle is often a necessary step in learning. At Barry, the curriculum allows children to better make sense of the world around them relating the pattern between mathematics and everyday life.
Implementation
At Barry Primary School, we use White Rose resources to implement our curriculum through the CPA (Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract) approach. A wide range of mathematical resources are used and pupils are taught to show their workings in these forms as appropriate. We follow a Teaching for Mastery curriculum as endorsed by the Department for Education (DfE), OFSTED and the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM). We believe that high expectations are crucial – teachers believe that all children can achieve, and they are encouraged to believe that through hard work, they can succeed in Mathematics, whatever their background or previous experiences. Our lessons involve whole-class teaching with children working through lesson content at broadly the same pace, mastering content before moving on to the next steps in learning. This involves carefully planned, small, coherent steps that are achievable. Those children that find grasping a concept more challenging are offered rapid intervention so they are more equipped to move on with the class. We differentiate through depth rather than accelerating through content, encouraging our pupils to access challenges at their level when working independently, as well as when being supported in order to achieve their full potential. Our children are required to reason mathematically and are offered opportunities to work on key ideas and learning that encourage intelligent practice. This is fostered by drawing children’s attention to important features and structures of Mathematics and by making connections through lessons that incorporate procedural variation (by varying numbers or unknowns, strategies or problems) and conceptual variation (by varying the representations given to support children’s understanding).