Mathematics

Mathematics Intent

At St George’s our Mathematics curriculum is to provide learning which is accessible to all and will maximise the development of every child’s ability and academic achievement. We see maths mastery as ‘deep, sustainable conceptual understanding for all.’

At St George’s, this is achieved through talking about, investigating and representing mathematical concepts, following the White Rose framework and using the Third Space Learning scheme of work.

Children will:

- Grow to ‘notice’ number and invest the time in experimenting, solving, concluding and explaining these patterns.

- Make rich connections across mathematical ideas to develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and competence when solving sophisticated problems.

- Appreciate that mental calculations and written procedures, when chosen appropriately, can be performed efficiently, fluently and accurately to attain solutions.

- Develop a breadth of understanding of number, parts of a whole (fractions, decimals & percentages), geometry, measure, statistics and problem solving and are able to apply this to the world around them.

- Understand that mathematics is an essential part of everyday life and apply their knowledge across other subjects.

Implementation

At St George’s we follow the Third Space Long term and Medium term structure to plan our mathematics alongside our St George’s pathways which is in line with White Rose activities, to ensure pupils will become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics and able to apply their learning to a variety of problems.

Every lesson:

● Begins with an opportunity to revisit; bringing prior learning to the forefront of our minds, keeping strategies and learning fresh to be applied to the world around us.

● Has appropriate choices of manipulatives and representations available; these are important tools in helping students to think and reason in more deep, meaningful ways.

● Has high expectations on both the teacher’s and children’s use of mathematical vocabulary and answering in full sentences; to ensure children can make links with mathematical concepts and have the tools to talk and discuss mathematical principles and make generalisations

● Uses stem sentences and generalisations as a structure to apply to their understanding

● Follows the necessary small steps of learning and has a clear intention; to ensure ALL children are able to access the same learning and follow lessons through well thought out small, manageable progression points.

We understand that retrieval practice is an important part of the learning process and it is vital that all children have regular opportunities to retrieve prior learning. By revisiting prior learning from the long term memory, children activate their working memory, increasing children’s ability to fluently retrieve information. As memories can forget overtime we use Flashback 4 (from White Rose) daily to revisit prior learning, spacing out the opportunities for retrieval.

Impact

In order to evaluate the level to which children are retaining knowledge and able to apply their learning to situations, we use a range of techniques:

● Pre and post unit assessments

● Daily Flashback 4 for recall

● A variety of assessment for learning strategies are used

● Subject monitoring including book looks

● More formal assessment through FFT and previous SATs to track progress.

● Cross-curricular opportunities to enable opportunities to apply the skills through other curriculum areas

● CPD to ensure that teacher pedagogy and assessment is secure

● Regular feedback and pupil voice feedback

Maths pathways for each class can be found here