Maths @ St. Bart’s

The vision for Maths @ St. Bartholomew’s is:

• To create a positive and resilient attitude towards mathematics and develop an awareness of the fascination of mathematics.
• To build confidence and competence in mathematical knowledge, concepts and skills.
• To develop an ability to solve problems, to reason, to think logically and to work systematically and accurately.

At St. Bartholomew’s CE Primary School, we value a maths curriculum that is creative and engaging. We believe that maths is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment. We intend that St. Bart’s children will make rich connections across the areas of maths and apply their skills and knowledge in other subjects.

At St. Bart’s, all children, from Reception to Year 6 will be the best mathematicians they can be and make progress in all lessons. They will develop skills to become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics and quickly transfer and apply knowledge in different contexts. They will achieve this by developing their independence and resilience and being proud of their mathematical ability.

We recognise the importance of taking a consistent whole school approach to the teaching of mathematics in order to close any gaps and to ensure the highest possible number of children attain the expected standard. Maths is an interconnected subject in which pupils need to be able to move fluently between representations of mathematical ideas.

Pupils will develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and competence in solving increasingly sophisticated problems and knowledge will be embedded into long term memory.

At St. Bart’s we follow the White Rose overview from Reception to Year 6 to ensure that our children have full coverage of Maths in the EYFS and the Maths National Curriculum. Alongside this overview, all children are given the opportunity to revisit topics and previous learning through daily Fluent in Five and weekly Arithmetic sessions – this allows further knowledge to be embedded. All children are able to access every lesson with the relevant support or challenge through our adaptive teaching – this provides the opportunity for each child to make progress in every lesson.

We ensure that maths is taught in a variety of creative and engaging ways, using a wide array of maths manipulatives to aid and support our children in their learning. Our aim at St. Bart’s is to develop the deepest of learning for our children, so that their knowledge can be transferred and applied in many contexts, including other subjects and their everyday lives.

Each classroom offers a Maths Working Wall that the children utilise to support their current learning. Our aim is to ensure that the three core areas of the National Curriculum are covered in all of our lessons: fluency, reasoning and problem solving. We offer the children the opportunity to have varied and frequent practise of their maths skills with the focus on their ability to recall and apply their knowledge rapidly and accurately.

Mathematical vocabulary is an essential part of each lesson and the children need to understand this within the area they are studying and be able to make rich connections across other areas within this subject. Each lesson provides children with the opportunity to become fluent and master a concept before moving on to reasoning and problem solving.

We hope to build problem solvers of the future and build resilience in our children; essential skills they can use in all aspects of their learning.

To evaluate how well our children are learning and check that they are remembering more and applying more, we use a combination of formative and summative assessments, pupil interviews, work book scrutinies and lesson observations.

The outcomes of national assessments and observations of our pupils demonstrate that they are well prepared for the next stage in their education when they leave St. Bartholomew’s and make good progress from their starting points.

Maths Overview

Maths Overview – More Detail