Glade Academy

INTENT

At Glade, it is our intent that children develop a passion for maths and become successful, confident and resilient mathematicians who understand the role of maths throughout their lives, and view it with a positive attitude.

We believe that maths is essential to everyday life and can help children make sense of the world around them: automaticity and fluency are crucial in developing mastery of mathematical concepts.

“47% (of employers) said poor numeracy skills would prevent them from hiring young candidates.” BIS RESEARCH PAPER NUMBER 267

Throughout the education provided at Glade, it is our intent that children develop the necessary fluency to become proficient in mathematics - the support of parents / carers and the wider community is crucial in achieving this. We aim for every child to have mastery of their number facts (multiplication facts and number bonds) and to be able to access age-appropriate material, removing barriers to learning using pre-teaching which will have a focus on vocabulary and use of sentence stems to support children in accessing key concepts. We put learning passports in place for children who are working on objectives below that of their year group.

Fluency requires the child to:

• Use sound number sense (e.g., composite numbers, number bonds);
• Use confident knowledge and application of the four operations;
• Know what the right strategy is to solve the mathematical problem.

Our intent is to ensure that opportunities to develop fluency are present across the curriculum and real-life scenarios are used whenever possible, such as scheduling (sports events or television); cooking (scaling ingredients, division/ sharing, volume) or measuring during DIY projects.

Maths will also be a vehicle to develop our school core values:

Respect:

1. Value: Belief that maths is a valuable subject and is worth studying.
2. Achievement: Belief that all children can develop the mathematical skills.
3. Celebration: Celebrate the achievement of others. 

Resilience:

1. Struggle: Recognition that struggle with maths is universal, even with people who have a high level of mathematical skill 
2. Growth: Confidence that all people can develop mathematical skills and disbelief that some are born with or without the ability to learn 
3. Resilience: An orientation towards negative situations or challenges in the study of mathematics resulting in a positive response. 

Teamwork:

1. Collaboration: Working collaboratively to solve problems.
2. Turn taking: Taking turns to solve problems and play maths games.

IMPLEMENTATION

In the National Curriculum, mastery of content is key, with a great deal of emphasis being placed on problem-solving and reasoning, as well as fluency.

We have five lessons of mathematics a week with the lessons being based upon the White Rose schemes of learning, but these will be supplemented with work from NCETM ready to progress documents, N-rich and others when the situation arises.

As a result of the emphasis on fluency, we prioritise the use of variation across the school to help develop an understanding of mastery; which could be a number line, a part-part-whole method for mental arithmetic, or bar models. At Glade, it is important that children understand the fundamentals of arithmetic, so they can apply this understanding in different contexts.

We understand that there are many steps that must be taken for a child to master a concept, and we use a concrete-pictorial-abstract approach: using manipulative such as dienes, multilink, place value counters. To support children in beginning to understand the concept before developing pictorial representations such as bar models and part whole models, which support them in mastering the content…and finally solving problems using the abstract formal methods.

We further believe that the use of variation empowers children to develop their own preferred method for solving some calculations.

In addition to the lessons, and to further support the acquisition of arithmetic and number facts, we also complete morning maths and a weekly ‘Beat It’ which require a range of mathematical skills within a strict time limit.

IMPACT

In lessons:

• Pupils may be assessed by the class teacher through mini white boards during mini plenaries or through the starter / flashback four.
• Responses in games or activities.
• Responses to pupils' written work which may be verbal or written.

After lessons:

The subject leader monitors the effective delivery of the maths curriculum by:

• Conducting book looks.
• Looking at medium and short term planning.
• Observing children in lessons.
• Completing pupil perception interviews.
• Reviewing and analysing PIXL and multiplication table check data.
• Analysing the teacher assessments on Pupil Asset