Intent

At St Sebastian’s, we believe that maths is an essential life skill that is used throughout our daily lives.

As a trauma & attachment informed school, we recognise that pupils learn best when they feel happy, safe, secure and regulated. We offer an ambitious curriculum that equips all pupils with the knowledge and skills to succeed. We aim to provide all our children, including disadvantaged pupils and pupils with SEND, a curriculum that is exciting, relevant and challenging. We ensure our curriculum is well-structured with progression, to promote mastery. We provide opportunities for pupils to apply mathematical concepts in reallife contexts. Maths is developed and enjoyed in all aspects of school life and with the whole school community e.g. fundraising, events and initiatives reflecting local and global themes. We strive to ensure that all children develop a positive attitude towards maths and numeracy and become confident, life-long mathematicians.

Our teaching of mathematics is based on the mastery approach – the belief that every child is capable of success. Our carefully designed maths curriculum endeavours to reflect this, thus providing a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject.

Implementation

Maths at St Sebastian’s is taught through daily lessons using the Power Maths scheme. Lessons are creative, engaging, and built around opportunities for children to explore, discuss, and reason about mathematical concepts. We use journalling to encourage pupils to record their thinking, explain their reasoning, and make connections between ideas. All children receive tailored support through adaptive teaching, ensuring that individual needs, learning styles, and levels of understanding are met within the classroom. Our aim is for every child to develop fluency, flexibility, and confidence in their mathematical understanding and to apply this knowledge across the wider curriculum and in everyday life. We want children to make rich connections across mathematical ideas, to reason logically, and to approach problem solving with curiosity and resilience.

We aim to ensure that all pupils:

• become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils have conceptual understanding and are able to recall and apply their knowledge rapidly and accurately to problems
• reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language
• can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.

Impact

We believe all our children will:

• acquire an enjoyment and love of maths.
• develop positive attitudes to Numeracy and Maths.
• demonstrate and use their mathematics confidently within their daily lives.
• understand that mathematics is a powerful tool for communication.
• have an ability to solve problems, to reason, to think logically and to work systematically and accurately.
• make mathematical links with other areas of the curriculum and become aware of the uses of maths in the wider world.
• develop personal qualities such as perseverance, independent thinking, cooperation and self confidence.
• have equal access to high-quality mathematics education, regardless of their background or ability.