Maths Mastery

 

 

Intent 

At Lynch Hill, we constantly strive to enable all pupils to be the best they can be, from nursery to year 6. Maths Mastery enables us to achieve this. We refer to the crucial learning steps and blocks of learning as detailed in ‘Power Maths’ and ‘White Rose’ resources. The teaching of maths mastery takes place in mixed ability groups, allowing for high ceiling shared learning within each group to ensure all pupils are challenged with quality learning opportunities for all. 

With maths mastery, teaching is no longer about procedures, shortcuts and tricks, its rather about understanding maths concepts.  Using real life contexts, teaching practical maths right from EYFS throughout the school, ensuring the pupils appreciate that maths is a life skill needed to prepare them for everyday life. 

Implementation 

Our maths mastery curriculum covers the EYFS and National Curriculum targets and takes the pupils further and deeper in their understanding.  This is a whole school approach to the subject – consistent across all year groups and ages. 

Across the school pupils investigate the concrete form of maths (physical situations and resources), progressing on to pictorial (representations and diagrams) and then finally the abstract (symbols and calculations), in order to fully appreciate an idea, enabling them to apply their skills in all kinds of settings. 

Fluency sessions are designed to enable pupils to commit key skills to the long-term memory, thus freeing up space in the working memory for assimilating the new concept-based learning of the maths master scheme. 

Children of all abilities are supported, from those who struggle with basic skills to those who need to stretch their understanding; a programme of keep up (not catch up) and deepening activities for rapid graspers, is skilfully implemented across the school on a daily basis. 

We encourage pupils to be more independent in their learning, by maintaining our high expectations and utilising the 5B strategy (Brain, Board, Book, Buddy, Boss). 

Timely end of unit assessments ensure that the children are tracked; with support implemented if required. 

We are committed to helping parents understand how to support their child at home by offering access to TimesTable (TT) Rock stars as well as encouraging parents to visit www.whiteroseeducation.com to better understand Maths Mastery. 

There is a continuous cycle of staff training, moderations (Inter-school comparisons), networking and shared experiences to best inform teacher practice and supply quality first teaching. 

Impact 

Lesson visits, show that our classrooms are buzzing with activity – enthusiastic discovery in action.  Talking with the children, we find that maths is more real to them, and this engages them, producing improved behaviour for learning.  They can identify the maths within an every-day problem and have the confidence to apply their own chosen strategies to solve this.  Pupils can explain their reasons and justifications for this using accurate mathematical language. 

Click here to download the ' Can' statements for Maths 

Maths Mastery at Lynch Hill School Primary Academy 

At Lynch Hill, we constantly strive to enable all pupils to be the best they can be. 

We continue to teach for mastery as this ethos adopts new strategies from the traditional successful Singapore style maths and combines them with successful tried and tested British teaching to achieve the best outcomes for our pupils in the modern world. 

Process 

We are utilising the effective PowerMaths scheme complimenting this with resources from the widely known fully aligned WhiteRose maths scheme. We craft our maths curriculum to meet the expectations of the national curriculum and meet the needs of our pupils. 

Staff Training and Support 

As the maths mastery concept is very different from the traditional form of teaching maths, all staff continue to be fully supported in this long term endeavour. This is being achieved by: 

Every new teacher in school is supported and trained by the Maths lead to fully understand the features of this style of teaching. In addition, we are also active member of the local Maths Hub supported by NCETM. 

Staff continue to develop their practise to deepen understanding of the maths mastery style and ideals, alongside maths mastery resources in all classrooms to support the learning and understanding of all pupils. 

What is teaching for mastery? 

Mastering maths means that pupils of all ages develop a deep, long-term, secure, and adaptable understanding of the subject. The phrase ‘teaching for mastery’ refers to the classroom approaches that best support pupils in achieving this level of understanding. 

At Lynch Hill, we follow the principles and guidance of the NCETM and Maths Hubs in their work on teaching for mastery. This approach is underpinned by the Five Big Ideas, which are rooted in both research evidence and classroom experience. The diagram below illustrates how these ideas are interconnected: 

Coherence 

Teaching is designed to enable a coherent learning progression through the curriculum, providing access for all pupils to develop a deep and connected understanding of mathematics that they can apply in a range of contexts 

Representation and Structure 

Teachers carefully select representations of mathematics to expose mathematical structure. The intention is to support pupils in ‘seeing’ the mathematics, rather than using the representation as a tool to ‘do’ the mathematics. These representations become mental images that pupils can use to think about mathematics, supporting them to achieve a deep understanding of mathematical structures and connections. 

Mathematical Thinking 

Mathematical thinking is central to how pupils learn mathematics and includes looking for patterns and relationships, making connections, conjecturing, reasoning, and generalising. Pupils should actively engage in mathematical thinking in all lessons, communicating their ideas using precise mathematical language. 

Fluency 

Efficient, accurate recall of key number facts and procedures is essential for fluency, freeing pupils’ minds to think deeply about concepts and problems, but fluency demands more than this. It requires pupils to have the flexibility to move between different contexts and representations of mathematics, to recognise relationships and make connections, and to choose appropriate methods and strategies to solve problems. 

Variation 

The purpose of variation is to draw closer attention to a key feature of a mathematical concept or structure through varying some elements while keeping others constant. 

  • Conceptual variation involves varying how a concept is represented to draw attention to critical features. Often more than one representation is required to look at the concept from different perspectives and gain comprehensive knowledge. 

  • Procedural variation considers how the student will ‘proceed’ through a learning sequence. Purposeful changes are made in order that pupils’ attention is drawn to key features of the mathematics, scaffolding pupils’ thinking to enable them to reason logically and make connections. 

Following the core mastery teaching input, pupils engage in independent tasks designed to deepen their understanding through a variety of representations. These tasks support fluency in a rich and varied learning environment, with a strong emphasis on the CPA (Concrete–Pictorial–Abstract) approach. This ensures that all pupils build a secure conceptual understanding by moving from hands-on resources to visual models, and finally to abstract thinking. 

Problem solving and reasoning are central to this approach. Pupils are encouraged to explore multiple applications of mathematical concepts within a single session. Differentiation is embedded, not through separate tasks, but through the depth and breadth of reasoning and problem solving each pupil demonstrates. This is supported by carefully designed challenges that gradually increase in complexity across a range of mathematical contexts.  

Support for those needing extra help 

The PowerMaths and White Rose schemes have been expertly designed to minimise the need for interventions of this kind – the ideology is for pupils to keep up, not have to catch-up. It is recognised that some may need support from time to time, staff expertise and resources to enable this are available. 

The Maths fluency sessions can be utilised to provide personalised provision in addressing misconceptions from the previous learning session or pre-teaching in preparation for the next learning session. 

Support for high achieving pupils 

Learning sessions are carefully designed to enable more able pupils to explain their understanding, rather than just calculating a numerical answer. This might be through exploring different ways to solve the same problem, responding to or creating their own generalisations, providing them with questions where there is no clear signpost so they have to devise their own strategies to tackle them effectively, or explaining ideas or misconceptions that have arisen. There are many ways of doing this but we challenge pupils by deepening their understanding and ability to apply this in a range of contexts, rather than pushing them on to new content ahead of their peers. 

Learning Characteristics: 

As part of some partnership work with the Maths Hub during 2024-2025, we were able to work closely with a maths consultant to help us review and refine our offer further. This has resulted in us identifying and defining 6 learning characteristics that are central to being a good mathematician and, in turn, characteristics that we now feel underpin good learning across all areas of the curriculum. Through our teaching and learning, we are now actively looking to develop our pupils so that they are: 

  • Reflective Learners 

  • Organised Thinkers 

  • Strategic Appliers 

  • Insightful Thinkers 

  • Resilient Problem Solvers 

  • Confident Communicators 

Marking and Assessment 

Hot marking in lessons allows for teachers to identify trends and individual needs to be addressed during the lessons. Individual work on varied fluency and problem solving and reasoning informs teacher assessment which is recorded on the school’s online assessment tool.  Termly assessments are built into the White Rose Scheme to support ongoing assessment. 

Maths Mastery 

Maths mastery is a long-term journey that all staff and pupils travel together, with constant and timely review and improvement of teaching and learning. We look forward to continued success in maths at Lynch Hill and thank all our parents and carers for their continued support. 

 

Click here to download our Calculation Policy