Our vision is to guide all our students to an appreciation of the beauty and power of Mathematics, whilst equipping all our pupils with the mathematical tools to function as effective citizens of the modern World, such that their success in, and enjoyment of, Mathematics, enhances not restricts, their life journey.

Our KS3 curriculum provides access and progression routes to lower and higher prior attaining pupils alike. We follow a broad structure, in line with resources and shared expectations across the trust of which we are a member, but staff are both encouraged and expected to go beyond this, personalizing their delivery of the shared curriculum to better provide for the range of needs of their students, as well as securing staff professional ownership of their own taught curriculum. We are a department of reflective practitioners, committed to a cycle of constant self-evaluation and improvement, through involvement in both our whole-school and external CPD programmes.

The Department follows an inter-leaved curriculum which places a high value on student mastery, both of individual topics and of basic calculation skills. Consequently, students are expected to secure their content knowledge of new material, before seeking to apply this to either analytical or contextualized problems, or indeed to make links with other branches of the subject.

Our approach to teaching and learning supports our Maths curriculum by ensuring that new content is delivered in small chunks, accompanied by extensive modelling and opportunities for guided and independent practice through our “I”, “We” and “You” phases of the lesson. In this way we adhere to the Central Academy Teaching and Learning Fundamentals, which are themselves underpinned by Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction.

To ensure that all students make good progress, all students complete KPI tests after each topic or unit, which broadly equates to once every two weeks. At KS3 these assessments are tracked, and both starter mats and interventions will be adapted according to areas requiring development. Key vocabulary will be taught and assessed through knowledge organisers. At KS4 there is a much stronger focus on assessing fluency. Alternating with their fortnightly assessment, all KS4 students will sit a fluency test, with an expectation that all students must achieve at least 80% on these fluency tests. Progress is here again tracked using fluency trackers and classroom teachers will adapt future teaching accordingly. Feedback sheets containing identified area of development are given after each KPI or Fluency Tests assessment. Pupil engagement in home-learning and elevation sessions is also closely monitored.

In addition to the above formative assessment, students are summatively assessed in all year groups at least bi-annually, although this increases in frequency during Years 11 and 13.

Through the curriculum we aim to develop students’ appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity for the subject. The success of this will be monitored through engagement in enrichment activities such as the UKMT maths challenge, and of course, uptake of the subject at KS5 and beyond.

However, it is also true that many of the students we teach will not pursue the subject beyond the age at which it ceases to be compulsory for them. For these students, we seek to remove the barrier that poor Mathematical understanding can prove to a person’s life journey, by developing those skills of mathematical fluency which enable young people to function as citizens in modern Britain. We want to broaden the horizons of our students, such that they themselves aspire to succeed at GCSE grade 4 and beyond in Maths, and so widen and not restrict their opportunities in life, both locally, nationally and indeed on the World stage, should they choose.