Intent Statement

We believe all children can achieve mastery in Maths.  By modelling small steps and building fluency, children reflect, discover and collaborate to achieve deep conceptual understanding.  This helps to promote long-term learning, equipping children with knowledge and skills for life.  Our aim is for all children to develop a love of Maths, to become curious and resilient problem solvers and to confidently use a range of mathematical vocabulary to explore and explain concepts. With a secure understanding, rich connections can be made between subjects and our children will leave More Park well equipped with the mathematical tools that they need for the future, making them the very best that they can be.

Implementation

At More Park, with Gods help, we implement Maths through using the Mastery Approach following the Power Maths Scheme of Work.  Detailed in the document below you will find our Calculation Policy outlining the different ways each area of Maths is taught in each year group.  Both teachers and teaching assistants have access to online and hard copies of expert and detailed planning and lesson resources.  A variety of teaching and learning opportunities provide the children with active and stimulating learning experiences:

• Teachers share learning objectives via a problem solving (discover) activity at the start of each lesson.

• Carefully chosen, mixed ability talk partners are used to create speaking and listening opportunities for children to explain their thinking in mathematics. Mathematical talk and specific mathematical vocabulary is a non-negotiable. Children are expected to speak in full sentences when explaining a concept or procedure. Crucial sentence stems to embed understanding are recorded by teachers on the class ‘maths working walls’.

• Children may work individually on a task, in pairs or in small groups, depending on the nature of the activity.

• To develop secure and deep conceptual understanding, staff are expected to plan for the use of concrete resources, representations and structures (outlined and guided through Power Maths) to reinforce learning objectives and to support pupils with English as an additional language and/or additional needs.

• Lessons are planned to engage and encourage the full participation of all pupils.

• Lessons are planned to engage and encourage the full participation of all pupils. The planning materials used by staff, within the Power Maths scheme, promote intelligent practice and as well as developing own staff subject knowledge, children have opportunities to develop their mental arithmetic skills within most lessons.

• Differentiation is seen through the concrete resources used, and/or the reliance on the representations and structures within a lesson to help embed a mathematical concept. All children are expected to be exposed to age related expectations and staff allow the time to plug gaps if they are not yet ARE within an area of mathematics. Staff understand what ARE and mastering looks like for each objective (power maths practice books) and plan for how their children will get there. In order to meet the needs of all pupils, children working above ARE within an area of mathematics have ‘going deeper’ opportunities planned by staff.

• Teachers create an ethos in which all children feel they can contribute and feel valued.

• Teachers place a strong emphasis on the correct use of mathematical language.

Once a Maths unit has been completed, each pupil takes part in a summative assessment. This is to check pupils’ understanding and address any misconceptions before moving onto a new topic. Pupils take part in daily formative assessments linked to place value, addition, subtraction and times tables.

Pupils’ progress is regularly discussed at pupil progress meetings between the class teacher and senior leadership team. Together they plan how they can support pupils to continue to make progress and also how they can  be stretched and challenged. From their Maths learning, we want all children to have a strong understanding of all areas . We want them to be able to use the skills their have learnt and apply them to all aspects of their everyday life.