All of our classes, from Foundation to Year 6, follow our calculation policy, which has been adapted from the White Rose Hub materials to suit the needs of our school and our children. The calculation policy sets out the importance of the concrete, pictorial, abstract method of working – this means that children are given opportunities to develop their fluency, reasoning and problem solving skills through the use of ‘concrete’ materials (such as counters, Numicon, etc), and through the use of images, before moving on to more abstract written calculations.

Just as we do in reading and writing, in maths we use talk to deepen our understanding. Maths is not just about being right or wrong and our children will often be asked ‘How do you know?’ ‘Can you explain why you are right?’ ‘What’s the same, what’s different?’ Our children are not only taught to follow procedures, but are given the skills to understand and discuss how and why a calculation works, and more importantly, what to do if it doesn’t!

Our current focus in mathematics is to develop how we think about the subject: Mathematics is such a huge part of everybody’s everyday life – when we looked closely at the jobs our grown-ups do we discovered that nearly all of them use maths in one way or another, and when we looked at our own lives outside of school, we realised that we are already using maths every single day - we are all mathematicians, at school we develop those skills which we will use on the next step of our journey.

National Curriculum Mathematics