Our Maths lead is Mrs Williams.

Maths at St Margaret’s

At St Margaret’s, we believe through developing a deep and lasting procedural and conceptual mathematical understanding, children will develop a love of maths, flourish as mathematicians and shine throughout their school lives and beyond.

We aim to provide pupils with a broad range of activities which allow the children to apply known facts whilst making links to other areas of the curriculum and real-life situations; building their confidence and enjoyment in the use of mathematics at school and other real life situations.

Mastery of mathematics is something that we want all pupils to acquire. We use the phrase 'teaching for mastery' to describe a range of elements of classroom practice and school organisation that combine to give pupils the best chances of mastering mathematics.

Mastering maths means acquiring a deep, long-term, secure and adaptable understanding of the subject. At any one point in a pupil's journey through school, achieving mastery is taken to mean acquiring a solid enough understanding of the maths that has been taught to enable them to move on to more advanced material.

Mastery

Five Big Ideas in Teaching for Mastery

Coherence: Connecting new ideas to concepts that have already been understood, and ensuring that, once understood and mastered, new ideas are used again in next steps of learning, all steps being small steps.

Representation and Structure: Representations in lessons expose the mathematical structure being taught, the aim being that students can do the maths without recourse to the representation.

Mathematical Thinking: If taught ideas are to be understood deeply, children must have the opportunity to think about them about, reason, and discuss with other pupils.

Fluency: Quick and efficient recall of facts and procedures and the flexibility to move between different contexts and representations of mathematics.

Variation: Varying the way a concept is initially presented to children, by giving examples that display a concept as well as those that don't display it. Also, carefully varying practice questions so that mechanical repetition is avoided and thinking is encouraged.

You can find the full ‘Mathematics programmes of study: key stages 1 and 2’ on the www.gov.uk website. This gives a detailed overview of the curriculum content covered and the development across the two key stages; for example, the progression towards work with ratio & proportion and algebra in Year 6.

All pupils  across the school from year 3 - year 6 use concrete manipulatives during maths lessons to deepen their understanding of key maths concepts.