At Blaydon West Primary School, we place a great emphasis on the importance of Maths within our curriculum. Mathematics introduces children to concepts, skills and thinking strategies that are essential in everyday life and support learning across the curriculum. We aim to teach children how to make sense of the world around them by developing their ability to calculate, reason and solve problems.

Lessons build on progression and depth of learning.

• Teachers/ TAs present knowledge clearly, and effectively model and teach skills.
• Children receive daily mathematics lessons delivered by a teacher.
• Lessons/ sequence of lessons include fluency, reasoning and problem solving where appropriate.
• Lessons are exciting and engaging.
• Lessons provide appropriate challenge for all groups of children.
• Misconceptions are addressed through marking, verbal feedback, adapting planning, TA intervention where appropriate.
• CPD to support teacher knowledge.
• Y2-Y6 receive weekly discrete arithmetic lessons in arithmetic books.
• Arithmetic skills and problem solving are recorded in separate books in Y2-Y6.
• Times table battles through TTR take place weekly across the school to encourage and improve times table recall.
• Maths intervention groups take place where appropriate.
• Children are assessed on a termly basis (bi weekly arithmetic assessments occur across all year groups – year 1 in Spring term).
• Pupils who grasp concepts rapidly will be challenged to deepen their understanding through rich and sophisticated problems and not accelerate through to new content.
• Teachers use opportunities in other subjects to rehearse mathematical skills in a context where appropriate.

In our Early Years Foundation Stage, we aim to:

• Develop a secure and deep understanding of numbers to 10.
• Develop and improve Mathematical vocabulary to give children the skills to explore, explain and describe characteristics of everyday objects/time, measures and money.
• Give children the skills to solve problems.
• Provide provision to allow children to use and apply their mathematical skills they have learned.

In Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, children study the National Curriculum for Maths and we aim to:

• Become fluent in the fundamentals of Mathematics through varied fluency tasks and discrete weekly arithmetic sessions.
• Provide children with the skills to allow them to reason and problem solve by applying their mathematics to a variety of increasingly complex problems of varying types.
• To build on children’s knowledge and understanding from nursery to year 6.
• To develop children’s resilience and stamina to be able to reason and problem solve with confidence.
• To develop and build on children’s mathematical vocabulary allowing them to be able to reason mathematically.