...a haven of hope and aspiration...
Maths Lead: Mr Biddlecombe
At Archbishop Courtenay Primary school, we aspire that each child will leave the school as a confident mathematician. We believe that maths is fundamental to understanding the world around you and is a regular part of our daily lives: from reading timetables, to measuring the probability of something taking place to handling money. Therefore, our goal is to create a strong foundation of number sense in all our pupils so that they can eventually move towards manipulating number and finding patterns, problem solving and investigating theories.
As in all areas of the curriculum, we promote a love of learning, wisdom, hope and dignity - and maths is no exception. We want children to adopt an ‘I can’ attitude, trying new things and learning from their mistakes in a low-stakes environment so that they don’t grow up, repeating the classic line: ‘I can’t do maths!’.
At Archbishop Courtenay Primary school, we understand clearly our responsibility in preparing children for future opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life, laying the foundations so that they can take their place successfully in modern British society. This is evidenced through our teaching and learning, our inclusive environment and through the many opportunities provided for our children to understand democracy, law, liberty, mutual respect and tolerance.
We use the White Rose Curriculum to support the teaching of Maths throughout the school and in KS1 we also implement a ‘Mastery of Number’ approach to ensure that all children leaving KS1 have strong ‘number sense’ and are therefore best placed to understand the concepts behind number when they enter KS2.
Our curriculum is built upon procedural fluency where small steps and small adjustments are made within, and building upon, a child’s learning journey so that they can build up their knowledge and skills confidently and securely, minimising gaps in learning.
Time and space are given, on a daily basis, for children to practice their times tables and be reminded of previously learnt content in low-stakes quizzes so that they can continue to build upon this knowledge for the future.
Children are monitored on a regular basis to check progress. We encourage all pupils to take responsibility for their own and their peers learning. Teacher assess and monitor progress through their teaching and questioning to enable then to adjust accordingly through planning to meet the children’s individual learning needs.
More formal assessments happen at the end of each unit of work (e.g. Place Value), at the end of each term (PIXL assessments or White Rose) and through regular quick-fire arithmetic quizzes (in KS2).
In Year 4, we also enrol in the Multiplication Check that is completed nationally. This is a five-minute test of 25 randomly assorted 12-times-tables questions. For each question, the children have just 6 seconds to answer. A helpful website to practice is linked below.
At Archbishop Courtenay Primary School, we believe that all pupils should have the opportunities to share their pupil voice. We do this in a number of ways. The curriculum allows opportunities for pupils to develop the skills, knowledge and understanding when using their pupil voice. The subject leader finds out pupil’s opinions about the teaching of Maths and the content covered through interviewing selected pupils during lesson observations. The subject leader acts upon the comments and suggestions of pupils wherever possible.
• Every long term, team competitions will take place based off that long-term’s learning. This will hopefully be extended to school vs school.
• Whole school events such as science week that have a STEM focus will have maths heavily present within them.
• Improve the quality of teaching of Maths, ensuring a mastery approach is continued to be embedded across all classrooms.
• Ensure consistency is seen across and within both key stages with the way Maths is taught and the structure of a lesson.
• To promote times tables across the school through the use of TTRS competitions across classes and hubs and closely monitor the progress of times tables for each child.
This will be monitored through the collection of pupil and staff voices, up-to-date data from our summative assessments, looking through the children’s books and learning walks with lesson observations.