Maths

The sequence of the curriculum has been deliberately designed to allow our high prior attaining and our low prior attaining pupils to successfully progress through the content.  

Cognitive research (Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, 2006) suggests that students need a large amount of subject knowledge in their long-term memory to become competent at any subject. In Maths, pupils will be far better equipped to apply mathematical thinking to a problem if their working memory isn’t overloaded with basic calculations. Therefore, our curriculum always emphasises secure content knowledge before moving onto problem solving tasks. This is a step away from discovery-based learning and acknowledges the gap between teachers as experts and pupils as novices, with the key point being that we can’t expect pupils to show mathematical expertise until they have acquired fluency with numbers.