Why we teach Mathematics at St. Chad’s
Mathematics is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment.
It provides our pupils with a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject.
How we teach Mathematics at St. Chad’s
Mathematics is taught discretely in designated lessons once a day in Year 1 to Year 6. At St. Chad’s, we follow the White Rose mastery approach where learning is broken down into small steps, spending time carefully considering each. We believe every child can do maths therefore our pupils are taught together as a whole class and the focus is on depth – not acceleration – so that all have a chance to embed learning. Developing problem solving and reasoning skills is a thread that runs through all of our lessons. Our pupils are constantly challenged to explain why, to prove how they know, to convince that they are correct or to find all possible outcomes. Our pupils are encouraged to apply their skills across all areas of learning such as creating tables and graphs in Science and using formulae in Computing.
What we aim to achieve through the teaching of Mathematics at St. Chad’s
To ensure that all of our pupils:
- become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that they 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 nonroutine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions