Mathematics is a key life skill. Through our passion, deep knowledge and understanding of maths pedagogy and knowledge of how pupils learn maths, children will gain the knowledge and understanding to confidently use their skills to work within our world today.

We proudly work with the Cambridge Maths Hub and a cluster of schools to sustain Teaching for Mastery principles through collaborating within workgroups.

Our mathematics lead is a Local Leader of Mathematics Education and works collaboratively with practitioners in school and beyond at a national level, alongside mastery mathematics specialists, to embed teaching for mastery principles that enhance the learning and unfold the maths for all children.

The new National Curriculum states that:

“Mathematics is a creative and highly inter-connected discipline that has been developed over centuries, providing the solution to some of history’s most intriguing problems.  It is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment.  A high-quality mathematics education therefore provides 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.”

At Southfields, we use White Rose as a basis for our maths lessons and build our lesson design based on Teaching for Mastery principles.

This is an exciting class mastery approach, which has been recommended by the DfE, that works for every child.  It is based upon the concrete, pictorial and abstract approach. 

Every lesson is divided into sections that involve plenty of explore opportunities, discovery, sharing, collaboration, practice and reflection. Children are encouraged to solve problems each day through the use of concrete resources, pictorial representations and abstract thinking.  

At the heart of this programme is the idea that all children can achieve and be successful mathematicians with the right growth mindset.  It breaks the learning into small chunks that progressively build on cohesively to inspire and motivate children.  

As with everything we do, our Mathematics is supported by communication and vocabulary development.  To ensure that children can make good or better progress we spend a high percentage of time discussing  elements to think mathematically and learning how to use question stems to answer questions in our learning.  Within each classroom you will see a 'Working Wall' that displays the language the children are currently focusing on along with the area of Mathematics they are studying within White Rose. As this is a Mastery approach, the children will spend more time repeating and practising their learning to ensure that it embeds into their long term memory and therefore are able to apply across other areas of the curriculum.