Maths
At Ashchurch, we follow the White Rose Maths Curriculum. The information below is taken from their website.
The basic principles
The fundamental idea behind the White Rose curriculum design is to support pupils to be able to perform simpler tasks so they can then move on to perform more complex tasks. For example, we cannot expect pupils to add two numbers together before they understand what each individual number represents.
This thinking gives rise to a typical sequence of ‘blocks’ of mathematics that you will see in most year groups.
Within each of these blocks we then have ‘small steps’ which are again sequenced in order of difficulty and dependency. Here are the first seven steps (of 18) in our Year 3 Addition and Subtraction block:
Why is the White Rose Maths curriculum different to any other? What skills does it develop?
We want pupils to become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, to be able to reason and to solve problems. Our curriculum embraces these National Curriculum aims, and provides guidance to help pupils to become:
Visualisers – we use the CPA approach to help pupils understand mathematics and to make connections between different representations.
Describers – we place great emphasis on mathematical language and questioning so pupils can discuss the mathematics they are doing, and so support them to take ideas further.
Experimenters – as well as being fluent mathematicians, we want pupils to love and learn more about mathematics.
Why is the White Rose Maths curriculum ordered in the way it is?
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.
Is the White Rose curriculum ‘mastery’ or ‘spiral’?
Sometimes educational debate can be very divided into ‘black or white’ positions such as ‘traditional’ or ‘progressive’ teaching, ‘conceptual’ versus ‘procedural’ learning and, of course, ‘mastery’ or ‘spiral’ curricula. Often there are good points to both sides of any argument, and there is need for a more nuanced and balanced approach.
We’ve tried to combine the best of both ‘mastery’ and ‘spiral’ approaches in our curriculum. It certainly follows many of the mastery principles – spending longer on topics to help gain deeper understanding, making connections, keeping the class working together on the same topic and a fundamental belief that, through effort, all pupils are capable of understanding, doing and improving at mathematics. But we also recognise that just spending a good chunk of time on a topic doesn’t mean that all pupils will ‘master’ it the first time they see it, and that they need to see it again and again in different contexts and in different years to help them truly develop their understanding on their journey to mastery, so we’ve built in the revisiting and reinforcing features of spiral curricula too.