Maths

The Importance of Maths

Maths is an important part of all of our daily lives. It is an ever-growing and interconnected understanding that allows us to: recall and apply facts and knowledge rapidly and accurately; follow lines of enquiry, spotting patterns, making links and connections and inherently builds resilience within us to solve increasingly complex problems.

For children to become successful mathematicians, they have to secure several skills including: fluency and fact recall, reasoning (which involves conjecturing relationships and generalisations, developing arguments, justifications and proof) and problem solving (breaking down problems into smaller steps and persevering to find solutions).

Vision

By the time that our pupils leave Heron Park, we want them to be able to access a range of age-related mathematics, demonstrating that they are able to move fluently between representations and deeper mathematical thinking (quality). We want them to develop a love for mathematics (passion) and to become the best mathematicians they can be (excellence) so that they are able to function mathematically within their later lives and society.

Our Approach

To best meet the needs of our pupils in maths, we provide quality first teaching and learning opportunities, that ensure all pupils have opportunities to become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, reason mathematically and solve problems, applying their maths understanding.

We offer daily maths lessons, of at least forty-five minutes, that build upon prior learning and that are delivered through a small steps approach with plenty of worked examples and modelling. Throughout each unit, concepts are introduced through a CPA model (concrete, pictorial, abstract) and children are exposed to a diet of conceptually and procedurally designed tasks.

Our maths lessons are taught whole class, with our less confident mathematicians being supported/ scaffolded effectively to access the same concepts at their level and our rapid graspers being provided with opportunities for stretch and challenge.

A range of assessment for learning pedagogies are employed to ensure high pupil engagement and attainment, including lots of opportunities for oracy and discussion around maths, time to address misconceptions and chances to find examples and non-examples. 

We support our children's maths growth further, by offering additional maths meetings in the afternoons, for 15 minutes daily. In KS1, these sessions focus predominantly on delivering the Mastering Number programme, alongside teaching key addition facts, in line with the end of KS1 expectation. In KS2, these sessions focus on tackling multiplication fact recall and understanding and aim to fill children's gaps in mathematical understanding.