Mathematics is essential to everyday life, it intertwines many other disciplines and is critical to science, technology and engineering whilst being essential for financial literacy. The national curriculum aims to ensure that all children develop fluency, mathematical reasoning and competence in solving increasingly sophisticated problems.

At Stoke, we achieve this by fostering a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject. Children learn core concepts by using anchor tasks to provide a real life problem and before using our concrete, pictorial, abstract (CPA) approach to ensure deep understanding in concepts that are being taught.

Children are given the chance to understand and explain what they’ve learned by ‘doing’ first of all, using concrete objects. Developing children’s mathematical vocabulary is key to this and all lessons drive the use of accurate vocabulary and maths displays are built around this so that they become a crucial element of the learning.

To plan lessons the teachers follow the white rose overview. The yearly overview for each year group suggests the teaching time needed for every block of learning but this is flexible if more time is needed to master the objectives being taught. The Autumn, Spring and Summer sections are split equally into 12 weeks comprising 11 weeks of blocks followed by a week of consolidation. The objectives in each block are broken down into a series of carefully planned small steps. Teachers teach the content in the suggested order as the step sequence is designed to gradually develop children’s understanding. Teachers then adapt planning as necessary to meet the needs of their pupils.