Mathematics
The Mathematics Curriculum at St Mary's
At St Mary’s, we intend to deliver a curriculum which is accessible to all and allows every child to achieve their full potential within mathematics, providing them with life-long skills that will help them to succeed in the future. We want our curriculum to provide opportunities to make rich connections across mathematical ideas in order to develop fluency and mathematical reasoning to enable them to solve complex problems.
Here at St Mary’s, we want to encourage all children to be confident when learning mathematics and know that mistakes are an essential part of learning. We believe that all children can achieve in mathematics by learning in manageable steps, which are planned carefully into the curriculum.
At St Mary’s, we deliver the National Curriculum, supported by a clear progression of skills that ensures that knowledge and skills are built upon year by year and sequenced appropriately to maximise learning for all pupils. Children are taught daily maths lessons that follow the long-term maths plans, which are designed for each year group or phase.
Early maths at St Mary’s focuses on number sense, place value and the use of objects and pictures before numbers to ensure children have a firm understanding of mathematical concepts. This enables them to take early steps into problem-solving and linking mathematical concepts. As pupils move through the school, they develop understanding of mathematical concepts through a range of pictoral, abstract and concrete representations in order to deepen their understanding. Misconceptions and mistakes are carefully addressed as an essential part of the learning and rich challenges are provided through problems presented.
By the end of KS2, we aim for children to be fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics with a conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately. They should have the skills to solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of situations with increasing sophistication, including in unfamiliar contexts and to model real-life scenarios. We will have prepared pupils at St Mary’s to have the mathematical knowledge, skill and understanding that enables them to be ready for the challenges that they face along the next stage of their academic journey.