Intent, Implementation, Impact
Intent
Our long-term aim is to produce an ambitious, connected curriculum accessible to all pupils in schools right through from Reception to the end of Year 11. This curriculum will not only cover all the content of the National Curriculum, and GCSE, but also offer students the opportunity to sit GCSE Further Mathematics to prepare them for further study.
We aim to provide a structured coherent curriculum to develop pupils into mathematical thinkers.
Implementation
To learn mathematics effectively, some things have to be learned before others, e.g. place value needs to be understood before working with addition and subtraction, addition needs to be learnt before looking at multiplication (as a model of repeated addition). You will see this emphasis on number skills first, carefully ordered, throughout our primary curriculum. For some other topics, the order isn’t as crucial, e.g. Shapes and Statistics need to come after number, but don’t depend on each other. We try to mix these so pupils have as wide a variety of mathematical experiences as possible in each term and year.
In Year 7, we start with algebra as this is key to the secondary curriculum as well as being comparatively new for pupils. Again we carefully order the skills – understanding notation, one-step equations, then two-step equations etc., revisiting the concepts in other areas of the curriculum and making sure that topics are covered so pupils experience variety as well as consolidation.
Within topics, students will have the opportunity to progress to GCSE Higher objectives, as well as those from the GCSE Further Maths specification.
Impact
Students will sit regular short assessments in class to support knowledge retrieval and enhance their practice. Key Assessments will be more summative and measure retention of knowledge and skills over a longer period. The timings of Key Assessments will follow the whole school calendar.
Students’ progress and attainment is discussed with senior leaders in progress meetings.