INTENT

At Larwood, we see maths as an important life skill and intend to create an accessible, fun, and purposeful curriculum that enables all children to succeed and be confident with their maths abilities. We want children to enjoy maths and relish challenges so that they can be successful in the next steps of life.

We incorporate sustained levels of challenge through varied and high-quality activities with a focus on fluency, reasoning and problem-solving which allow children to apply mathematical knowledge, concepts, and procedures. 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 fashion, before establishing ways of pictorially and formally representing their understanding. They are taught to explain their choice of methods and develop their mathematical reasoning skills. We encourage resilience and acceptance that making mistakes is a necessary step in learning.

IMPLEMENTATION

At Larwood school, children study mathematics daily covering a broad and balanced mathematical curriculum including elements of number, calculation, geometry, measures, and statistics. 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, Cuisenaire rods and place value counters. We continuously strive to better ourselves and frequently share ideas and things that have been particularly effective. Our staff have received regular training into how to use problem-solving strategies, such as bar modelling and actively model and encourage our children to apply this approach, if useful, when problem-solving.

In addition, maths is pre-taught or post taught to individual or small groups of children within our essential’s curriculum. This enables pupils who may need more attention on a particular topic to have the input they require to aid in closing gaps in understanding and allow for retention and depth of understanding over time.

Long term planning is used across the school to map out the areas of the maths curriculum that will be taught throughout the year. Teachers have flexibility within their own classes for how long and when topics will be taught using the scaffolding from Chris Quigley. Teachers use Depth of Learning to assess gaps when planning the sequencing of their lessons. Assessment and re-consolidation time is also built into these plans to give teachers time to reconsolidate children’s learning where necessary.

We have created a whole school calculation policy which details the progressions of written and mental calculation methods being used across the school. Teachers are able to use this to build upon children’s previous learning and plan from this to structure future learning sequences.

We will soon be offering yearly parental workshops to cover different elements of the maths curriculum being taught at different stages of the school and invite families to attend. The idea of these workshops is to give families an insight into the expectations of different year groups and help to provide them with tips on how to support their child’s learning at home.

IMPACT

Class teachers and curriculum leaders constantly assess the impact of the maths curriculum and monitor the progress of both groups and individuals. Teachers amend planning and reconsolidate areas of learning to ensure children make good progress. Teachers assess the learners in their class effectively and when appropriate identify children who need additional support either before or after teacher’s sessions to ensure learning outcomes are high – this takes place in Essentials on a day-to-day basis and where appropriate via in-class interventions delivered by our intervention team. The maths leader monitors the teaching and outcomes of the maths curriculum and provide feedback to teachers to ensure children not only meet the expectations of the National Curriculum but exceed them. This ensures that children at Larwood achieve their full potential and have an in depth and broad understanding of the maths curriculum. Leaders and teachers are up-to-date with the latest technology, teaching developments and resources; they thoughtfully plan engaging lessons which ensure children enjoy maths and can apply their knowledge and skills for real purpose.  Pupils leave Larwood Primary school ready for the next step in their maths learning, having gained the core knowledge, skills, and ability to apply, reason and problem solve.