Vision 

At St Martin’s C of E Primary School, we believe that maths learning is crucial to all children’s development. We aim to inspire our pupils to have a passion for maths, so that every child thinks of themselves as a true mathematician, which will open up possibilities for them in the future.  

We will achieve this through the following: 

• Fostering a ‘can do’ attitude in our children within a safe environment, through developing a growth mindset, where learning is paramount and mistakes are celebrated and used as stepping stones to deepen understanding. 

• Encouraging mathematical talk, where questions are asked to develop mathematical thinking, clarify understanding and identify misconceptions. 

• Broadening children’s knowledge and understanding of how mathematics is used in the wider world by making rich and varied real life connections. 

• Enabling our pupils to confidently reason about their mathematics, using a suitable range of mathematical language, recognising its importance for communication and deep thinking. 

Through our maths vision, we are fully committed to developing a balance between the children’s procedural fluency , a conceptual understanding and an ability to reason and solve problems. 

Rationale

At St Martin’s C of E Primary, we use the White Rose Maths frameworks and guidance to adopt a maths mastery approach to teaching. With this approach, all children can be encouraged to achieve excellence in mathematics through a positive ‘can-do’ attitude; no pupils are considered ‘low ability’ or allowed to feel like they ‘can’t do maths’ and children are taught to enjoy working with numbers. Through this approach, we aim to build a deeper understanding of topics, helping children become confident mathematicians who embrace mathematical challenges with a smile. We revisit topics on a daily basis through the ‘flashback 4’ quiz, where children are challenged to think back to their prior learning and allow the whole class to progress at a similar pace.  

We are often asked for advice on how to teach different calculations. Much has changed in the past 10-20 years, especially the methods used. We now ensure there is a strong grasp of key concepts using concrete and pictorial representations to help the children understand what is actually happening in the calculation. The calculation documents below will show you the methods we use and give a breakdown of how each one works. 

Overviews of the topics we teach in each year group and the progression across the school can be found below.