St Benedict's Catholic Primary School

'Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.'

Albert Einstein

At St Benedict's Catholic Primary School, we follow a mastery approach to learning.  We use the ‘White Rose Maths’ curriculum as the foundations for our teaching. This is a cumulative curriculum, so that once a topic is covered it is revisited and built upon many times in many contexts across the learners’ journey through the school.

Teachers begin lessons by revising and reviewing knowledge of concepts and skills to ensure they are embedded. Children are introduced to new concepts in small, logical steps. In order to tailor our teaching to our children, staff are equipped with a range of resources that support our curriculum. Through carefully planned activities, children are encouraged to work mentally, observe patterns, make predictions and discuss relationships.

Where children have not yet mastered a concept, rapid interventions and pre-teaching takes place to support learners. Where children are confident, they are challenged by deeper thinking questions allowing them to demonstrate full mastery of concepts. We do not move on through the curriculum until children have grasped the concepts taught.

As a school we use the CPA (Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract) approach to support our mastery curriculum. Children are taught to represent mathematical concepts in these three ways to both support and challenge their learning:

• Concrete – children can use concrete objects and manipulatives to help them understand and explain what they are doing.
• Pictorial – children then build on this concrete approach by using pictorial representations, which can then be used to reason and solve problems.
• Abstract – With the foundations firmly laid, children can move to an abstract approach using numbers and key concepts with confidence.

In EYFS, the children follow the NCETM mastering number curriculum and provision is matched to the learning to ensure the children recieve a rich learning experience.

.  We use the WhiteRose documents alongside the DFE Ready to Progress guidance to ensure children are spending time mastering the key areas of learning.