Our Maths Curriculum

Curriculum Intent

At Chambersbury, we strive to enable all our children to become competent mathematicians through a curriculum driven by inspiration and aspiration. We aspire to embed the skills and processes necessary to enable children to use and apply their learning in a variety of contexts. We aim to develop children’s enjoyment of maths and provide opportunities for them to build and secure a deep, sustainable, conceptual understanding of maths.

Our approach to the teaching of mathematics develops children’s ability to work both independently and collaboratively. Through mathematical talk, children will develop the ability to articulate and explain their thinking and reasoning. By the end of key stage two, children will leave our school as emotionally resilient lovers of mathematics, which will enable them to thrive in their future lives as assets to society.

Curriculum Implementation

After much consideration, we chose to follow White Rose Maths Schemes of Learning to enable our transition to maths mastery teaching. We felt it provided a coherent learning progression through small steps, a range of representations and structures, opportunities for fluency, variation and opportunities for deep mathematical thinking (NCETM 5 key principles).

In maths at Chambersbury, teachers: 

• Teach maths daily as a dedicated lesson.
• Use WRM overviews to ensure appropriate coverage is achieved over the academic year.
• Elicit the children’s starting points with each topic through the Primary Assertive Mentoring summative assessments, understanding the children’s prior knowledge.
• Enable all children to work to achieve their age-related learning intention.
• Include a range of concrete, pictorial and abstract representations to enable deeper understanding.
• Ensure their lessons from Monday to Thursday begin with ‘Flash in 4’, where children complete fluency questions.
• Facilitate discussions interspersed with collaborative and explorative tasks which enable the teacher to gauge children’s prior knowledge and unpick misconceptions.
• Address misconceptions immediately throughout the lesson.
• Instruct and model key learning.
• Provide guided learning for identified learners to enable them to access and succeed with independent learning.
• Provide relevant and purposeful independent learning opportunities. During this time, the teacher will use open-ended questions to assess and develop the children’s mathematical understanding. Deepening opportunities are proved for those children who have developed the concept being taught.
• Plan opportunities for a structured reflection at the end of each lesson.
• Ensure that the content is taught at the same pace through differentiation of depth, rather than by acceleration to new content. The learning needs of individual pupils are addressed through careful scaffolding, skilful questioning and appropriate rapid intervention, in order to provide the necessary support and challenge.
• Formatively assess throughout the lesson; the teacher regularly checks pupils’ knowledge and understanding and gives live, verbal feedback accordingly.
• Every other Friday, children across the whole school partake in Big Maths lessons. These are carefully and conscientiously planned by the teachers, prioritising areas of weakness across the school, to contextualise maths into real-life problems.
• In our Early Years unit, follow the EYFS curriculum. This entails a lot of 'hands-on' learning but, most importantly, we also plan carefully to ensure the children have concrete and pictorial experiences of number. Our intent is for children to become experts in the numbers 1-10 then 1-20. We want them to be confident with counting but it is also key for later mathematical development that they are beginning to add and subtract as well as show a deep, conceptual understanding of place value. We do this is by following White Rose Maths guidance.
•  

We use Primary Assertive Mentoring (AM) assessments for each year group every half term as our summative assessments, as well as AM basic maths skills tests every two weeks. The maths assessment criteria are taken straight from the Programme of Study (PoS) for the National Curriculum. Each year group has its own assessment criteria sheet taken from the relevant PoS. What makes the AM assessment approach unique is that all criteria are assessed every half term, evidencing progress and allowing teachers to know prior knowledge to inform planning.

Curriculum Impact

The children will have acquired a deep, conceptual understanding of maths. They will be able to make connections between concepts and contexts. They will be able to articulate their understanding confidently. We evaluate the children’s learning through a variety of formative and summative assessments to ensure our curriculum is effective.