Maths

At St. Paul’s, we are committed to ensuring that all our pupils are successful in the three core areas of the National Curriculum: fluency, reasoning and problem solving. We believe that everyone can succeed at maths. Our spiral curriculum aims to embed an enthusiasm for maths in children and empower them with the skills they need to achieve as high a standard as possible. We are dedicated to enabling children to recognise how maths relates to the wider world in order to give the subject meaning and relevance, and so that they can use their mathematical skills and knowledge in real-life situations.  

 We follow the teaching sequence outlined by the White Rose Maths Hub schemes of learning. This ensures that a coherent, consistent approach is adopted in all year groups. The curriculum is broken down into small manageable steps in order to ensure that each lesson has a clear focus and helps children understand concepts by following a carefully planned sequence of lessons. This avoids the cognitive overload that can occur when too many concepts are covered at once and ensures that each lesson contributes to the long-term goal. Within each lesson, children have the opportunity to acquire, practice, apply and deepen their knowledge and skills as appropriate. Pupils who understand concepts quickly are challenged by being offered rich and sophisticated problems to deepen their understanding. Concepts are revisited over time so that children can reinforce them and embed them into their long- term memory. Teachers have the flexibility to spend longer on specific skills or concepts if they feel it is necessary.  

 When introduced to a new concept, children have the opportunity to follow the concrete – pictorial - abstract approach. Concrete objects and manipulatives help them understand what they are doing. Alongside these, children use pictorial representations that can be used to help reason and solve problems. Concrete and pictorial representations then help support children’s understanding of abstract methods.