Our aim is for all children to be able to access an engaging, coherent and challenging journey through maths with the belief that they can achieve an in-depth understanding.

As a school, we are always looking for opportunities to improve your children’s education and as you may know, since the change in National Curriculum in 2014, the expectations and the way that mathematics is being taught in schools has changed drastically. Inspired by a teaching philosophy from Asia, the teaching for mastery approach is being adopted across the country, and here at Sproatley, we believe that over the longer term, this is the way that mathematics should be taught so that children can apply maths in the wider world as they grow up.

The teaching for mastery approach aims to provide all children with the opportunity to learn the basic foundations of mathematics earlier on in their school lives, and then build on these and gain a deeper understanding of all concepts throughout their academic journey in school. We have come a long way implementing and modifying the teaching for mastery approach, undertaking much training and development, in order to deliver an even better education for your children.

The mathematics lessons and curriculum we provide help and guide our pupils to make sense of the numerical world around them by being fluent in basic number facts, understanding patterns and applying learning to real-life problems.

The skills and concepts are broadly separated into the following areas:

• Number
• Place Value
• Addition and Subtraction
• Multiplication and Division
• Fractions
• Measurement
• Geometry
• Statistics

These are further divided into fluency of mathematical basics within each section as well as reasoning and problem solving. These are taught at all ages following the teaching for mastery approach and CPA (Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract) framework. This encourages the children to firstly understand mathematics through physical representations before linking this to different visual/pictorial representations and finally to grasp the abstract nature of the numbers or problem that they have encountered.

We endeavour to teach lessons that are stimulating and interesting in addition to keeping a keen eye on the fact that many mental skills need hard work and regular practice. It is amazing the confidence that is gained when our pupils have mastered their number bonds or times tables. To support learning of times tables, we include a variety of IT resources such as TT Rockstars.

At Sproatley, staff use the materials provided by NCETM to aid the planning and delivery of the maths curriculum. These resources have broken down the broad areas of maths into small steps to allow incremental progress to be made throughout the curriculum. Staff use materials such as the NCETM spines which have broken the steps up even smaller and have provided resources to support the teaching of these concepts.

Children at Sproatley are exposed to ‘Basic Skills’ sessions in maths. These are shorter sessions separate to the main teaching lesson which provide opportunities to consolidate learning from previous areas of maths and keep skills fresh in the children’s minds. Each year group has a set of ‘Basic Skills’ to achieve by the end of that year and through the ‘Basic Skills’ sessions, children are constantly accessing short activities linked to these particular key skills.