Maths

Our Approach To Maths

Intent

At St Thomas Primary School, we have adopted the principles and practices of teaching for mastery in mathematics. These principles and practices permeate everything we do and we focus on ensuring that pupils believe (and are encouraged by the fact) that by working hard at maths they can ALL succeed. So what is maths mastery?

Maths teaching for mastery rejects the idea that a proportion of people ‘just can’t do maths’. Best practice consistently shows that mastery of small, cumulative steps builds a solid foundation of deep mathematical understanding. At St Thomas, we have adopted Power Maths as a whole school programme of study. So what is Power Maths?

Implementation

Power Maths combines interactive teaching tools, high-quality textbooks and continuing professional development (CPD) to help St Thomas Primary equip children with deep and long lasting mathematical understanding.

At the heart of Power Maths is a clearly structured teaching and learning process that helps us make certain that every child masters each maths concept securely and deeply. For each year group, the curriculum is broken down into core concepts, taught in units. A unit divides
into smaller learning steps – lessons. Step by step, strong foundations of cumulative knowledge and understanding are built. Finally, we use a range of formative and summative assessments to closely monitor the pupils’ understanding of the maths concept being taught (see below).

In the event that a child is assessed at working significantly below their year group, they will follow the Power Maths programme appropriate to their ability in small groups every day.

The class teacher may feel a concept needs extra time to enable greater fluency. Teachers will then design a bespoke lesson for the following day; gaps within each term are allocated for deepening, strengthening and practice activities.

Power maths is developed with the 5 key principles of ‘maths for mastery’ at its core: fluency, mathematical thinking, representation and structure, coherence, variation. The school is on a journey to embed these principles into every learning opportunity and is currently part of two teaching research projects in partnership with the Jurassic Maths Hub and the N.C.T.M.

Impact

School leadership holds termly monitoring meetings with class teachers to review the impact of the teaching on children’s progress. Further, the school’s maths lead talks to small-targeted groups across all years using ‘Children as Evidence Maths moderation’ tools. At the end of every year, analytics tools within Power Maths highlight any areas of the curriculum which require further strengthening.

Our school aim is that by the end of KS2 children are fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics with a conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately. They should have the skills to solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of situations with increasing sophistication, including in unfamiliar contexts and to model real-life scenarios. Children will be able to reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry and develop and present a justification, argument or proof using mathematical language and representations.

The next part of the journey..

Each year we want to take a strand from the principles of maths for mastery and develop it’s use through a TRG structure; small groups collaboratively planning/observing/ assessing/refining practice to support CPD and monitoring.

Current research groups
Year 3 of ‘Developing a whole school maths for mastery approach’
Year 1 of ’Building Firm Foundations in EYFS 2021’

How do we teach calculation at St Thomas Primary?

Please click on the links below to find out more about our approach.

KS1 Calculation Policy

Lower KS2 Calculation Policy

Upper KS2 Calculation Policy

Power Maths

KS1 to Power Maths – Progression (pdf)

KS2 to Power Maths – Progression (pdf)

Power Maths Progression Overview (pdf)