Intent

At Holy Family, we intend to provide a curriculum which caters for the needs of all individuals and sets them up with the necessary skills and knowledge for them to become successful in their future adventures. We strive to incorporate sustained levels of challenge through varied and high-quality activities with a focus on fluency, reasoning and problem solving as we want children to make rich connections across mathematical ideas to develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and competence in solving increasingly sophisticated problems. 

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, pictorial and abstract form wherever suitable. They are taught to explain their choice of methods and develop their mathematical reasoning skills. We encourage resilience and acceptance that struggle is often a necessary step in learning. As our pupil’s progress, we intend for our pupils to be able to understand the world, have the ability to reason mathematically, have an appreciation of the power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject. Through good mathematics, whole school values and a whole child approach, we aim to nurture confident, resilient children who will strive for their personal best.

Essential characteristics of a mathematician at Holy Family: 

• An understanding of the important concepts and an ability to make connections within mathematics.
• A broad range of skills in using and applying mathematics.
• Fluent knowledge and recall of number facts and the number system.
• The ability to show initiative in solving problems in a wide range of contexts, including the new or unusual.
• The ability to think independently and to persevere when faced with challenges, showing a confidence of success.
• The ability to embrace the value of learning from mistakes and false starts.
• The ability to reason, generalise and make sense of solutions.
• Fluency in performing written and mental calculations and mathematical techniques.
• A wide range of mathematical vocabulary.
• A commitment to and passion for the subject. 

Implementation

Our curriculum distinguishes between subject topics and threshold concepts. Subject topics are the specific aspects of subjects that are studied e.g. Number and Place Value, Fractions and Geometry etc. Threshold concepts tie together the subject topics into meaningful schema. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, pupils return to the same concepts over and over, and gradually build an understanding of them.

The five threshold concepts in Maths are:

·         Coherence

·         Fluency

·         Mathematical Thinking

·         Representation and Structure

·         Variation

In order to achieve these aims, we follow the White Rose Maths and NCETM schemes of learning to ensure that the coverage for the year is completed. We use these plans to ensure that all objectives are covered for each year group and that we are planning to the five key principles to deepen children’s understanding. Within the White Rose Maths and NCETM schemes of learning, each National Curriculum objective is taught through fluency, reasoning and problem solving questions to develop mastery of each topic. To support this, we also follow the concrete-pictorial-abstract approach to ensure conceptual understanding and develop learning.

In Early Years, our Mathematical curriculum provides children with opportunities to develop and improve their skills in counting, understanding and using numbers, calculating simple addition and subtraction problems; and to describe shapes, spaces, and measure. Using a combination of White Rose Maths, NCETM and Mastering Number Schemes for Early Years, the children participate in short maths sessions daily. Maths will also be found in many areas of our provision and children experience it in a purposeful and meaningful context within their play. Our outside areas are just some of the areas in which children can explore number, shape, space and measures.

Impact

Through the explicit teaching of the Mathematical skills, both the teachers and the pupils assess their learning continuously throughout the lesson. Our assessment judgments incorporate both formative and post and prior summative assessment data to enable teachers to make informed decisions about the depth of their learning and the progress they have made over time.   

Children at Holy Family will be able to know more and remember more about Mathematics. They will be able to understand Maths concepts, vocabulary and will become fluent in mathematical understanding and reasoning. They will have the ability to reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language. They will be able to solve increasingly challenging problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.

This will allow them to progress in their learning and are well prepared for the next stage in their education as they move away from primary education.

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