Maths 

At Rougham Primary, our SHINE curriculum is evident throughout our mastery approach to our maths curriculum.

Skilful questioning and continuous assessment implemented by the teacher and supporting adults in the room ensure that excellence is secured. Misconceptions and opportunities for intervention are identified live in the lesson and quickly provided to ensure children are keeping up rather than catching up.

Following the research and evidence-led ethos of mastery approach, lessons are carefully planned in small step sequences to provide the opportunity for children to build a deeper understanding of mathematics and identify connections across mathematical principles to allow them to reason and problem solve effectively. Teachers implement a range of strategies from the NCETMs 5 Big Ideas (see below) to enable children to be successful in identifying these connections independently and confidently use appropriate strategies to find the answer.

Both maths mastery approach and our SHINE curriculum have the same principle for mathematics at its core: everyone can learn and enjoy maths. At Rougham Primary, we believe that mathematical ability is not innate and success is achieved and maximised through effort. For all children to hold this belief, we implement a low threshold, high ceiling approach where all children have the same starting point in the lesson and progress through the small steps of learning while accessing appropriate scaffolding for their needs. This scaffolding can be through the use of concrete and pictorial resources to support working, support from an adult or peer support.

By improving children’s confidence in mathematics and creating a culture where mistakes are seen as an essential part of the learning journey, we have grown brave, go-getting and curious learners. With our whole-school focus on oracy, children are encouraged to ‘think out loud’ and discuss their methods and approaches to problems and build on each other’s ideas and become collaborative thinkers. Children are excited about mathematical problems and challenges and use our ‘Dive Deeper’ framework to independently challenge themselves and their understanding.

Mathematics is a creative and highly inter-connected discipline that has been developed over centuries, providing the solution to some of history’s most intriguing problems. It is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary for financial literacy. At Rougham Primary, we are passionate about revealing the mathematics principles which are interwoven throughout the whole curriculum and beyond. We therefore include real life contexts for reasoning and problem solving opportunities in maths lessons as well as highlighting the mathematical tasks involved when working scientifically, within our computing curriculum and more. We also celebrate the mathematics through our STEM enrichment days and invite visitors working in STEM careers and STEM ambassadors into school to provide workshops and activities.

National curriculum aims 

In line with the National Curriculum Objectives for Mathematics, our intent is 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 non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions