At Upperby School we want our pupils to become competent and confident mathematicians.  We strive to embed the skills and processes necessary to enable pupils to use and apply their mathematics learning in a variety of contexts.  By providing opportunities for children to build a conceptual understanding, develop their basic skills, fluency and recall, before applying their knowledge to everyday problems and challenges, we develop pupils’ enjoyment of mathematics.  Promoting mathematical talk enables children to articulate and discuss their thinking and reasoning,  developing them as independent learners. Our pupils will leave Key Stage 2 prepared for the next step in their mathematical education.

At Upperby Primary School, we recognise that to enable our pupils to progress to deeper and more complex problems, they need to be confident and fluent across their end of year group expectations.   We use White Rose Maths (WRM’s) as the foundation of planning across the school. Mastering mathematics means children acquiring a deep, long-term, secure and adaptable understanding of the subject.  Pupils build on 'fluency' (knowing key facts) and move on to reasoning and problem solving, showing they can adapt concepts in different situations. Children are able to communicate their thinking to show they have fully mastered their learning. This allows them to become confident when working on key strategies, calculations or methods and applying within reasoning problems.   Concrete, pictorial, abstract is a highly effective approach used to develop a deep and sustainable understanding of mathematics in our pupils.  Our skilled teachers use this approach to reinforce concepts. We are developing the use of learning by Questions in Year 5 and Year 6 to support the learning and further embed knowledge.

Pupil Engagement - Our pupil voice surveys indicate that maths is a popular subject. Children enjoy maths activities such as using resources, using diagrams and pictures and working with numbers, They have access to Numbots and  Times Tables Rockstars websites which enable fluency and rapid recall of number facts.

Knowledge - Children build their maths knowledge by building on what they know. This journey begins in the Early Years where number recognition and the sequencing of numbers build to larger numbers. Knowing number bonds to 10 and bonds to 100 along with multiplication facts provide a solid foundation for skills to be developed.

Skills - Maths skills can be demonstrated in the way a child approached a maths task such as adding numbers or multiplying large numbers. Each skill is developed in an orderly way by making small steps of progress. 

Pupil Voice - Children are listened to and are able to express what went well and what they would improve with their own work.

Breadth of Curriculum - The National Curriculum provides guidance on what is taught. This can be found here.

A range of maths activities will also be used in other subjects throughout each year-group.