At St. Andrew's our aim is to develop lifelong mathematicians who are curious and use maths skills as a foundation for understanding the world around them. It is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment.  We want pupils to recognise the importance of having a deep understanding which is achieved by investigating and exploring mathematical concepts.

We use the White Rose scheme as a basis to plan our daily mathematics lessons. These schemes provide teachers with exemplification for maths objectives and are broken down into:

• Mathematical Fluency

• Problem Solving

• Reasoning

The National Curriculum aims to ensure all pupils:

• become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practise with increasing complex problems over time, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately

• reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language

• can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions

We also use Active Maths to ensure that we teach some of our sessions through physical activities. Children are encouraged to use sentence stems to help them explain their thinking, and they use a range of mathematical apparatus and representations to support their learning.

Our maths teaching and learning is underpinned by the following key messages*:

• Everyone can learn maths

• Mistakes help us to learn; never be afraid to make mistakes

• Asking great questions deepens our understanding

• Maths is about being creative and making connections

• Maths is about being fluent and flexible

• Understanding maths is much more important than how fast you are

• The steps that you take when finding the answer are just as important as the answer itself

*messages developed by Jo Boaler, Professor of Mathematics Education, Stanford University

Multiplication Tables Check

Since 2019-2020, schools in England are required to administer an online Multiplication Tables Check (MTC) to Year 4 pupils. The purpose of the MTC is to determine whether pupils can recall their times tables fluently, which is essential for future success in mathematics. To support children with their multiplication practise we use ‘Times Table Rockstars’ as an online learning platform.