Kirkheaton Primary School

Our aim is to ensure all children gain the skills, knowledge and confidence to investigate using maths with fluency and agility.

The Maths National Curriculum is our starting point for maths learning objectives. Age related expectations are used for each lesson. Children will all be working within the same learning objective, but may be learning different aspects of this objective/concept and will be using it in different ways. Children who have fully mastered the concepts will be asked to use this knowledge to think wider and deeper – this is called ‘working at greater depth’.

We use White Rose maths schemes of work and the ‘small steps’ as a starting point. We supplement these with ‘Gareth Metcalf and Testbase' for challenge and reasoning.

We have a ‘White Rose calculation policy’ which we use to develop the four operations from concrete ideas using manipulatives, into pictorial ideas using diagrams and charts leading into developing abstract algorithms and ‘formal methods’ to represent calculations. It is important for all maths lessons to have a range of activities to support the conceptual development for children.

Our daily maths lesson will also include a short session called 'Fast Five' to develop children’s ‘maths agility’. Children need to be taught how to use the maths they know to find out unknown facts. This teaching focuses on things like using known double and halving facts to find out larger number questions – for example 3 and 3 is 6 so 30 and 30 is 60, or I know that 8 and 2 make 10, so 80 and 20 make 100.

The children use TT Rockstars throughout school to help children learn their timestables. We have regular battles and challenges to help engage the children, which has resulted in having a positive impact on their mathematical learning.