Maths

Statement of Intent for Maths 

 At St. John the Baptist, we see maths as an essential life-long skill. We adopt the mastery approach to enable all our children to succeed. Our children will leave us with a high level of fluency, with the skills to problem solve and reason logically. We want our children to be confident mathematicians with a bank of strategies and the ambition to fulfil their potential. 

 Our aim is to enable children, regardless of background, ability and additional needs to be motivated, effective and independent life-long learners. By offering a stimulating and carefully structured experience using the concrete, pictorial and abstract approach, the children can explore and discover mathematical truths and in turn apply these within their learning. 

IMPLEMENTATION 

At St. John the Baptist, we provide a motivating, challenging and comprehensive maths curriculum that is accessible to all. Our whole school approach to the teaching and learning of maths involves the following: 

• Working with the Sussex Maths Hub to ensure all staff understand and embrace the mastery approach using the ‘5 big ideas’ of mastery in their teaching. It ensures all teachers have regular continual professional development through webinars and TRGs. 

• To ensure whole consistency and progression, the school uses the NCETM Curriculum Prioritisation in primary maths.  In addition, we use number blocks and I see Maths resources to support planning.  

• All classes have a daily fluency session in addition to the maths lesson. This provides additional time to teach strategies for mental maths. The children learn key facts such as multiplication tables and addition facts within 10 are learnt to automaticity to avoid cognitive overload in the working memory and enable pupils to focus on new concepts.

• Concepts are shared within the context of related problems, diagnostic questions, or misconceptions, which children are able to discuss with partners. These problem-solving activities prompt discussion and reasoning, as well as promoting an awareness of maths in relatable real-life contexts that link to other areas of learning. 

• We have a consistent working maths display in every classroom to ensure coherence across the school. It ensures that all classes are using the correct stem sentences and generalisations. It also ensures that children are identifying ‘what is’ a concept or ‘what is not’ to ensure variation and deep understanding. 

• All children across the school have access to concrete resources to support and deepen their understanding as well as presented with the concept in a variety of ways, including different pictorial representations.