Our Mathematics Lead is James Tolson. Our Times tables lead is Emma Thomas.

Our aim here at Firfield is to equip our pupils with the skills and knowledge needed to allow them to be successful citizens of the future, with a love of mathematics and a desire to aim high.

Our pupils are taught Numeracy in classes to ensure high levels of progress using the mastery approach, allowing pupils of all abilities to make progress within each lesson. We put an emphasis on the key foundation skills of mathematics – place value & number, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division – and these are taught at the beginning of each academic year, as they underpin the other themes of our Numeracy curriculum.  Within each lesson, teaching staff constantly assess the pupils’ understanding, through questioning and observing the responses being made, to evaluate the progress made, thus allowing timely intervention opportunities to be planned in to help pupils who are falling behind their classmates.

Our pupils are expected to discuss their ideas and develop reasoning skills through carefully selected tasks to allow them to develop, consolidate and apply their learning in different contexts to help them “master” the concepts taught.  Mental and written strategies are developed in a variety of ways, encouraging pupils to become fluent in their mathematical knowledge, such as recalling their multiplication facts.  Written calculations are taught through a series of stages, to help the pupils move towards more formal efficient methods, and these are set out as a clear teaching sequence in our updated written calculations policy.

Problem solving permeates the learning journey of each topic to help pupils see how maths can used in real life situations to prepare them for life in the future.  We help the pupils understand the maths they are learning by providing them with visual and practical resources, whatever their ability.  We also give the pupils opportunities to see the links between maths and other subjects through cross curricular activities, often linked to our termly topics.  In addition, there are opportunities for pupils to learn maths within the whole of our school environment, and staff plan in activities outside to bring maths alive for the pupils.