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 'I 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 does Maths Mastery look like? 

Teaching and learning looks very different from the ability sets, success criteria-led, repetitive process learning of traditional British maths teaching. 

Extra maths fluency time has been introduced to the timetable to develop the understanding of key concepts such as number bonds, times tables as well as mental and formal written methods of calculation. This is designed to enable pupils to commit these key skills to the long-term memory, thus freeing up space in the working memory for this concept-based learning of the maths mastery scheme. These sessions incorporate personalised support for all learners – consolidation or pre-teaching for those who find maths challenging, to reasoning and problem-solving activities for the rapid graspers to ensure they develop their thinking. 

Mixed ability groups in the mastery sessions allow for high ceiling, shared learning within each group to ensure all pupils are challenged, with quality learning opportunities for all.  The carefully designed programme of learning ensures that there are fewer topics, which are studied in small manageable steps to ensure deeper conceptual understanding.  Learning is designed to utilise carefully devised increases in challenge to enable all pupils to apply their maths skills in a wide variety of settings; carefully planned variation enables pupils to make and use links within and between their learning 

Seeing patterns, making links and mathematical generalisations ensure opportunities exist in every learning session for the deepening of ideas and breadth of understanding. 

Differentiation is evident through how deeply and widely the pupils can reason and problem solve within their independent task. This is achieved through the completion of carefully crafted increases in the challenge and variety present in a wealth of mathematical settings 

High importance is placed on the CPA approach, to ensure all pupils have means to develop their conceptual understanding using concrete, pictoral and then abstract ideas (see the Maths Mastery Calculations Policy for more details).  

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 the more able 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. 

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