Mathematics

Intent

Mathematics is a multifaceted discipline that encourages creativity, exploration, problem solving, evaluation and critical thinking. These are all essential tools intertwined in RHS’s maths lessons every day, helping our pupils to understand the world better and become engaged, thoughtful individuals. Having spent the last few years embedding a mastery curriculum, we are now driving forward the elements of fluency, problem solving and reasoning in every lesson. Teachers at RHS plan, teach and assess mathematics that is highly effective for all their learners, ensuring that every objective is appropriately scaffolded for support and challenging for stretch. Teachers prioritise making mathematics relevant, by ensuring pupils have context for their learning and are able to access said learning through a multitude of ways.

Implementation

At Rutherford House School, we instill positive attitudes towards mathematics from the beginning of a child’s learning journey, by encouraging and developing a growth mindset approach to everything. Pupils are aware that their success lies in the perspective they adopt, and this creates hard-working, problem solving individuals across all year groups. We teach a spiral curriculum, meaning that there is a very clear knowledge and skills progression, and children are continuously building on their prior learning, using this to support more challenging new concepts. Pupils are given the opportunity to constantly evaluate different strategies and methods that work for themselves, individually and in partnership with fellow classmates, and then use these strategies effectively in their lessons to support what they are doing. Encouraging pupils to access their learning through a variety of representations – concrete, pictorial and abstract – ensures a culture of challenge and scaffold in all classrooms.

Impact

By the end of KS2, all children will have a secure knowledge of the primary mathematics national curriculum, and will be able to use their mastery strategies to problem solve and reason appropriately. Pupils will have been taught from the content of their year group only, ensuring they have a deep and secure knowledge that will allow for a smooth transition to secondary school. Pupils will have the skills to solve problems in unfamiliar contexts, using the variety of strategies they have learnt over the years. They will then be able to mathematically reason by following a line of enquiry and presenting an argument or justification using mathematical vocabulary. These skills are embedded throughout the years at Rutherford House School, and used to create a solid foundation, allowing pupils to move on to the next phase of their education securely.