At St. Peter’s, we believe every child has the capacity to become an able mathematician. Our primary aim is to inspire an enjoyment of mathematics and create a sense of curiosity, allowing our pupils to develop an in-depth understanding of the application of mathematical knowledge and skills. 

We aspire to create ‘real mathematicians’, recognising that mathematics is a fundamental life-skill, it provides the tools for understanding science, engineering, technology and economics. It is essential in decision-making and for participation in society. Mathematics equips pupils with powerful ways to describe, analyse and change the world.

We foster ‘can do’ attitudes. We believe that all children can achieve in mathematics, and teach for secure and deep understanding of mathematical concepts.  We use mistakes and misconceptions as an essential part of the learning and provide challenges through rich and sophisticated problems before acceleration through new content.

As children progress through school their prior knowledge is activated through teaching and new information is linked to prior learning helping to develop pupil’s schema in the key areas and securing this information in the long term memory.  

Our Mathematics curriculum provides pupils with an opportunity to meet the aims of the National Curriculum where they build up their fluency, reasoning and problem solving skills. Our learners are exposed to rich and specific vocabulary.  Mastery is our chosen approach to growing our mathematicians. Our children are taught together to master their own year group’s objectives and deepen their understanding.

Our lessons follow a consistent approach where new content is taught and modelled explicitly and pupils are provided with a series of fluency questions that are linked directly to their learning objectives.  Pupils are then encouraged to reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry and develop and present a justification, argument or proof using mathematical language. The learning is secured through depth of understanding whereby pupils apply the skills and knowledge learn to a variety of problems with increasing sophistication, including in unfamiliar contexts and model real-life scenarios.

At St Peter’s we have chosen to follow the White Rose Maths scheme.  We made this decision because we are confident that White Rose Maths has a clear rationale for the sequence of the topics.  Importantly, it is designed to support pupils on their journey to mastery, knowing that to master addition, for example, requires developing children’s skills over many years - from single digit numbers, to multi-digit numbers, then decimals, then fractions, then negatives, addition in different units (such as time calculations). It would take several years to master addition, arguably one of the most basic concepts in mathematics, therefore White Rose breaks the journey down into small steps, which benefits the children in many ways:

* It allows for deeper learning of content

* No child is left behind, everyone progresses together, teachers have higher expectations

* Builds schemata for long-term retention

* Confidence is gained and perceptions of Maths are changed

* Cognitive overload does not occur

A further benefit to using White Rose is that as a Junior School we can see the starting points of our pupils through Key Stage 1, which supports us in designing and delivering a curriculum that ensures progress. Furthermore, it allows us to identify gaps in early maths and address these quickly and effectively through our teaching and learning.

If you would like further information on the curriculum we teach, please contact the school directly.

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