Our aim at Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School is for all children to enjoy mathematics and have a secure and deep understanding of fundamental mathematical concepts and procedures when they leave us to go to secondary school.  We want children to see the mathematics that surrounds them every day and enjoy developing vital life skills in this subject.

At Sacred Heart we endeavour to:

• Offer high quality environments to stimulate their mathematical curiosity.
• Develop a growth mindset and positive attitude towards mathematics.
• Become confident and proficient with numbers, including fluency with mental calculation and look for connections between numbers.
• Become problem solvers, who can reason, think logically, work systematically and apply their knowledge of mathematics.
• Develop their use of mathematical language.
• Become independent learners and to work cooperatively with others.
•  Appreciate real life contexts to learning in mathematics.
• Develop a love and enjoyment out of maths.

The teaching of maths follows the White Rose Maths Mastery approach of concrete, pictorial and abstract representations. This ensures that children are following a mastery approach by thinking, discussing, solving and proving their methods/ideas. Children are taught both fluency and problem solving & reasoning within each small step of learning. Formative assessments ensure that teachers gap identity gaps in learning and offer targeted support to ensure that all children have a deep understanding of the mathematical concepts being taught.

In Foundation Stage our practitioners focus on developing the five principles of counting. Maths is embedded within the areas of provision  and is taught discretely in Reception. Pupils initially explore numbers to 20 through the development of concrete and pictorial representations for numbers as a solid foundation for further progress. From Year 1-6 we break down the National Curriculum objectives into small manageable steps, which helps children to understand concepts better. Teachers plan purposeful and engaging tasks to give children the opportunity to embed fluency and to develop their reasoning skills through variation and noticing maths in real life.

Maths in KS1 is still very practical and children use a variety of concrete and pictorial resources to make maths as interactive as possible. In Year 2 children are beginning to work more independently and will be given more opportunities to choose an appropriate concrete resource or to apply a pictorial method.

In KS2 children continue to be  encouraged to use concrete and pictorial methods and are also taught the more abstract written methods. This enables children to think critically , allowing children to investigate and extend what they already know. Children are exposed to a range of engaging open-ended tasks that may require more than one answer or, in some cases, no right or wrong answer.

Mathematical Talk is  planned for and the explicit teaching of maths talks helps our pupils to be articulate and explain their reasoning. Teachers ensure that age appropriate vocabulary is modelled by the adults and mirrored by the children.

The national curriculum for mathematics aims to ensure that all pupils:

•  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 nonroutine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.

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