The core of our maths curriculum is the National Curriculum, which provides a detailed scheme that is logically sequenced. Our school curriculum builds upon this using some elements of published schemes and some in-house materials. We use the White Rose scheme and the Professional Development (PD) materials from the NCETM to complement our curriculum. We chose these schemes to develop our children’s problem-solving and reasoning skills due to weaker results in 2017-18 and children’s limited ability to reason about their work. The PD materials ensure we are teaching for mastery. Both schemes provide small steps with flexibility to meet the needs of all children. The schemes encourage mathematical talk with good prompt questions for teachers and the movement between concrete, pictorial and abstract representations which is important for deeper learning. Children can really see what they are doing when working out calculations, enabling them to make connections and thus giving them the knowledge to reason about their work. Our dovetailed scheme ensures that we are teaching for mastery across the school and that teacher’s pedagogy and practice are fit for the children’s needs. It ensures that the key skills are prioritised after the pandemic. We have also written a comprehensive calculation policy to demonstrate how we use manipulatives to work out calculations. This gives teachers and parents a format to follow when explaining new concepts.

We regularly review, assess and adapt our scheme of work to make sure that it remains exactly what our children need.