MATHEMATICS

Rationale

At Cherry Fold Primary School, we recognise that mathematics is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology, and engineering, and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment. We aim to provide a high-quality mathematics education with a mastery approach, ensuring that all pupils can: become fluent in the fundamentals of maths, to reason mathematically and to problem solve and apply their learning in a range of different daily scenarios.

Approach

Mathematics is learned discretely through daily lessons in all year groups across the curriculum and in continuous provision in EYFS. The mathematics curriculum is strategically organised, in order to allow pupils to make links between the maths they are learning and their prior knowledge. New knowledge and skills will always build on what has been taught previously. Maths lessons will revisit prior learning. Lesson starters will enable pupils to look back at work they have covered in previous units or other year groups. Throughout each unit, key vocabulary is introduced and revisited regularly to develop language acquisition, embedding as the topic progresses. Almost all of our pupils will be accessing age-related materials in lessons. Every child, no matter their ability, will have some form of age-related input during the initial teaching of a lesson. Every lesson will begin with an ‘Initial Problem’. These will allow pupils to agree, disagree, prove, debate and discuss their mathematics with one another. ‘Independent Learning’ tasks will build on this, providing children with a wider variety of these types of problems. ‘Deeper Learning’ tasks are designed to extend the learning further of children that have shown their understanding at a deeper level within the lessons. This will ensure that children are using more than just one skill to be able to answer the mathematical problems. Reasoning and problem solving are integral to the activities that children are given to develop their mathematical thinking. In order to support teacher assessment judgements, children carry out half-termly learning checks, in-line with the national curriculum for maths. Gap analysis of any assessment activities are undertaken and fed into future planning.

SEND

Children with additional needs are included in whole-class lessons and teachers provide scaffolding, through the use of targeted questioning and manipulatives within lessons to provide access to the learning for these pupils, where necessary. For those children who are working outside of their year group curriculum, individual, ambitious learning activities are provided, in order to achieve their targets, which are relative to their lower starting points. Pupils who are registered on the SEND register will have adapted tasks that are specific to their maths targets given on their EHCPs/ targeted learning plans. 

Mathematics Overviews 2024-25