Intent, Implementation and Impact

Intent

At Eastgate Academy it is our intent that all our pupils become fluent in the fundamentals and vocabulary of mathematics, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately across a range of contexts. Alongside securing fluency, we ensure that pupils apply this learning to reason, justify and prove their mathematical arguments. Our pupils seek to solve a variety of problems by applying their mathematics.

Implementation

As a teaching for mastery in mathematics school, we use a combination of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM), Power Maths and White Rose Maths resources, alongside the 2014 Primary National Curriculum and 2020 Department for Education (DfE) ready to progress criteria, to carefully sequence our mathematics curriculum.

At Eastgate Academy we use a concrete, pictorial and abstract (CPA) teaching approach to develop our pupils’ conceptual understanding of the fundamentals of mathematics. Once pupils have grasped the concept, they then develop their fluency skills and understanding through varied intelligent practice rather than mechanical repetition. Our pupils are regularly encouraged to use the correct mathematical vocabulary when explaining or justifying their answers. Furthermore, they are challenged to convince someone else or prove whether they are right or wrong.

Additionally, pupils are encouraged to check their answers using different strategies and experience rich and sophisticated problems in order to stretch, challenge and develop deeper thinking. Our expectation is that the majority of our pupils will move through the curriculum at broadly the same pace. However, decisions about when to progress will be based on the security of pupils’ understanding and their readiness to progress to the next stage. Those who are not sufficiently fluent with earlier material will consolidate their understanding, through additional practice and top up teaching, before moving on.

Impact

Our pupils will develop a positive sense of self by believing that they ‘can do’ maths and, therefore, develop their emotional and mental well-being. Moreover, they will become confident mathematicians who are not afraid to take risks, explore misconceptions and develop resilience as they develop into independent learners with inquisitive minds who have secure mathematical foundations and an interest in self-improvement. The progress of each pupil is tracked regularly through the PiXL assessment framework and the resulting question level analysis is then used to close gaps in pupils’ knowledge, inform next steps and future