Mastery in maths, which is at the heart of our school’s maths curriculum, means that the children should acquire a long-term, secure, adaptable understanding of mathematics; this means that they become completely secure in each element before advancing onto the next. At each stage of their learning, they progress through small steps, in order to become competent and then accelerate their learning.

In our school, we focus on promoting five key ideas:

• Coherence, where children become coherent in understanding different mathematical concepts and are competent in using relevant, accurate vocabulary;
• Representation and structure, where the children explore many different ways of representing numbers, calculations and other contexts, in order that it expands the way that they think and see things;
• Variation, where children are encouraged to look at different contexts and explore similarities and differences, therefore making links between them in order to aid their learning
• Fluency, where children rehearse basic skills in order to recall facts and information quickly;
• Mathematical thinking, where children look for patterns, make links, find relationships and connections, reason logically, explain and prove their findings.