At Chislet Church Of England Primary School, we want all our pupils to be confident and competent mathematicians. Through a mastery approach, we aim to

• ensure children have a fluent knowledge of arithmetic;
• be able to work with numbers;
• apply their skills to problem-solving;
• have the ability to reason;
• use known mathematical facts;
• use appropriate mathematical vocabulary to concisely explain their reasoning of a mathematical problem through rich and varied mathematical content;
• ensure that pupils do not see maths as an isolated subject but as part of their everyday lives;

At the core of what we believe, is ensuring children are confident and positive about mathematics through fostering success. Building connected mathematical knowledge and retention are fundamental to our ethos at Kings Hill. In all, we aim to develop mathematicians that are resilient and courageous in their mathematical endeavours.

At Chislet we use the White Rose schemes of learning to support our planning of lessons. The mastery approach embedded into our lessons, fosters the concrete, pictorial, abstract approach developed by Bruner. Lessons are structured around this approach with a high emphasis on concrete manipulatives to promote understanding.

Part of our daily maths lessons are as follows:

• Retrieval practice – this incorporates interleaving to ensure spaced practice of fluency and problem solving.
• Focused diagnostic questioning to inform the teacher of misconceptions in order to adapt and respond accordingly (responsive teaching).
• Carefully planned, precise worked examples to develop conceptual and procedural knowledge; this incorporates principles of variation to ensure children see mathematics framed in different ways.
• Manipulatives (accessed readily) and scaffolds to support learners’ understanding, used appropriately by the teacher and withdrawn when appropriate.
• When appropriate knowledge has been secured, exposure to rich mathematical investigations and enquiry opportunities in order to broaden understanding of relationships.
• Teachers skilfully question, follow up and respond to learners, in order to gather levels of understanding to adapt teaching.
• Following the lesson, if children are unsure or show a lack of understanding that needs further input, they attend same-day intervention.

Our maths curriculum is of a high quality and ensures there is clear progression. In order to ensure we measure impact, we gather a variety of data and feedback to check whether learning has occurred. The information gathered through these methods directly impacts the future planning of teaching and learning opportunities, ensuring that we are responsive to the needs of our learners.

• Formative assessments; through daily retrieval practice, we can check for children’s retention of previously taught concepts.
• Foundation Stage; summative assessment provided against the Early Learning Goals.
• Regular short summative assessments used in Years 1–6 are based on previous work, not the current unit. This promotes the principles of interleaving. These short assessments feed into planning and focus on retrieval practice.
• End-of-term summative assessments in Years 1–6 occur during three assessment windows yearly.
• Autumn & Spring assessments are taken from the White Rose and directly test what has been covered that term.