Intent

Why is Maths taught the way we teach it?

Mathematics is a creative, inter-connected subject, which feeds into many different experiences and situations in life. The daily teaching and exposition of Maths is essential to children’s development and critical in the advance of science, technology and engineering. It is also necessary for almost all forms of future employment. At Audley Primary School, we believe children should be taught to understand concepts fluently. After this initial step, all learners are exposed to reasoning and problem-solving activities that develop their understanding further and allows them to apply their understanding within a different context. We support all learning through the use of the Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract (CPA) approach in order to effectively support and extend children’s learning through the use of appropriate concrete Maths resources.

Implementation

What makes Audley’s coverage/approach to Maths effective?

Across the school, we have created our own bespoke mastery approach, similar in styles to those of White Rose and the NCETM, which staff follow consistently across the school.

During each lesson, teachers administer a short teaching input, followed by a ‘fluency practise’ whiteboard task where they are enabled to identify any children who are struggling with a skill and to support them via ‘The Learning Pit’ (guided group). Following teachers’ initial assessment for learning whiteboard task, children are set off to complete fluency, reasoning and problem-solving tasks, with access to ‘hotter tasks’ if the child feels confident enough to challenge themselves further. This allows for children to initiate and steer their own learning in a supportive setting, whilst still allowing teachers to also direct children to the most appropriate task for their progress.

Children have an opportunity at the end of each lesson to reflect on their learning for the week by using reflective statements to write about what they have learnt, what made their learning successful, the mistakes they made, and how they could be more successful next time. These reflective minutes also allow teachers opportunity to change the course of lessons over the week to focus on key aspects they may not have initially picked up on during assessment for learning opportunities earlier on in the lesson.

Across the school, we have changed and updated the school’s marking policy to allow for ‘feed-forward marking’, which enables teachers to identify misconceptions and to address them immediately, as opposed to addressing them within the following lesson.

By following a spiral curriculum, our pupils are able to revisit a topic, theme or subject several times throughout their school career. The complexity of the topic or theme increases with each revisit but new learning has a relationship with old learning and is put in context. We believe the benefits of teaching in this way are that the information is reinforced and solidified each time the pupil revisits the subject matter as it allows a logical progression from simplistic ideas to complicated ideas. Furthermore, pupils are encouraged to apply the early knowledge to later objectives.

In all Maths lessons, children are placed into mixed ability seating places so that all learners have the opportunity to extend their reasoning and understanding further by explaining it to their peers and supporting them with tasks.

Impact

What do we want an Audley Mathematician to know/have experienced/be able to do before they leave Year 6?

At Audley Primary School, reasoning and problem solving is at the heart of all mathematical learning and teaching. Each learning journey begins with a short exposition of a concept, followed by progressive teaching inputs each day to support previous learning and introduce new skills. These skills are then developed throughout a series of following lessons using a concrete-pictorial-abstract approach (CPA). Towards the end of the learning journey, the pupils have the opportunity to give problem-solving activities a go, which require a similar skill. By constructing the learning journey in this way, the pupils are given the opportunity to review their prior learning, learn new key concepts and skills, and apply what they have learnt to fluency, reasoning and problem-solving activities.