What is Maths at Westglade?

At Westglade, we are passionate about ensuring all our children see themselves as Mathematicians. Our curriculum is designed to both engage and challenge all learners to help them make progress. We have developed a mastery approach to the teaching and learning of maths. At Westglade, we define mastery as pupils acquiring a deep, long-term, secure and adaptable understanding of the subject. We achieve this by allowing pupils to focusing on ‘the next small thing’. In Key Stages 1 and 2, our teaching and learning is informed by White Rose Small Steps Progression. We do not use White Rose as a scheme. We do not believe that a scheme would be able to meet the needs of our pupils more so than the professional judgement of our teachers. White Rose provides the small step progression sequence which our teaching sequences follow. We then use their guidance as a tool to provide a clear exemplification of the curriculum expectations. Teachers use this to inform their teaching input and pupils application activities. For this reason, White Rose materials will be used but not exclusively as teachers will draw on a range of other high quality resources. All children are challenged to master the small step through fluency, reasoning and problem solving activities. Those who show a quick understanding are pushed to think more deeply about their learning. You can read more about teaching and learning in maths at Westglade in our policy (which details our procedures) and our rationale (which provides a narrative of the theory behind them).

How is Maths progressive?

In KS1 and KS2 (Years 1-6) our teachers follow the national curriculum objectives. Maths is taught through 3 main areas; fluency, problem solving and reasoning.

Our children...

• 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.
• reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language
• can 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.

                                                                                                                                            (National Curriculum, 2014)

You can see a breakdown of each year groups objectives and our long term plan below:

What does Maths look like?