Maths

At St Mary’s Catholic Primary School, we want to make mathematics fun and relevant while ensuring all children have the chance to excel in this subject. We believe a high-quality mathematics education provides a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about maths.

We want all our students to:

• Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.
• Reasons mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language.
• Solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.

Teachers at St Mary’s plan and teach high-quality lessons which support the children’s learning and understanding through the use of the CPA approach. This means teachers ensure children have the opportunity to use practical resources and visual representations to develop a secure understanding of concepts, which allows them to then move into the abstract.

Teachers in Reception through to Year 4 follow the National curriculum, using the Mathematics Mastery programme. Years 5 and 6 also plan using the National Curriculum but use the White Rose Hub as a support. All classes have a one hour lesson in the morning. All classes also have a short ‘Maths Meeting’ at a separate point in the day to reinforce key ideas and develop children’s recall of key facts and mental mathematics.

Mathematics is organised into the following areas: number and place value, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, fractions and decimals, measurement, geometry and statistics. Children have opportunities to apply their understanding to other areas of the curriculum, and solve increasingly sophisticated problems.

In Key Stage 2 (years 3-6) all children learn to follow a standard procedure for the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). Details of these can be found in our Calculations Policy.

Introduction of 2019-2020 Multiplication Check

Primary school children are expected to know all their times tables up to 12 x 12. Under the current National Curriculum, children should know their times tables by the end of Year 4 but they are not formally tested on them other than through the multiplication questions that are found in the Year 6 SATs tests. Therefore the government have introduced a national test that children will sit at the end of Year 4 to assess children’s proficiency in times tables.