Mathematics at Newport CE Junior School
At Newport CE Junior School, we believe that every child can be successful in mathematics. Our aim is to develop confident, curious and resilient mathematicians who understand mathematics deeply, make connections between ideas and can explain and justify their thinking.
Teaching for Mastery
Our approach to mathematics is underpinned by the NCETM Teaching for Mastery principles. Learning is carefully sequenced through small, connected steps, enabling children to build upon prior knowledge and develop secure and lasting mathematical understanding.
The Five Big Ideas of Teaching for Mastery are embedded within our approach:
Coherence – learning is carefully sequenced so that children make connections between previous, current and future learning.
Representation and Structure – carefully chosen representations and manipulatives help children see the mathematical structures that underpin concepts.
Mathematical Thinking – children notice patterns, make connections, reason, conjecture and explain their ideas.
Fluency – children develop secure knowledge of key facts and procedures and learn to use these flexibly and efficiently.
Variation – examples and questions are deliberately selected and sequenced to highlight important mathematical relationships.
We place particular importance on depth of understanding, rather than simply learning a procedure or method.
Active Learning and Mathematical Oracy
Mathematics at NJS is an active and interactive process. Children are expected to think, discuss, question, explain and respond throughout lessons, with regular interaction between teachers, pupils and their peers.
Oracy is central to our mathematical pedagogy. Through carefully considered questioning, partner talk, sentence stems and the explicit teaching of mathematical vocabulary, children learn to articulate their thinking with increasing confidence and precision.
Questions such as ‘How do you know?’, ‘What do you notice?’, ‘Can you prove it?’ and ‘Is there another way?’ encourage children to understand not only what the answer is, but how and why the mathematics works.
Responsive Teaching and Assessment for Learning
Assessment for Learning is embedded throughout our mathematics teaching. Through questioning, discussion, observation and children’s responses, teachers continually assess understanding and respond to learning as it happens.
This allows teaching to be adapted within lessons through additional explanation, carefully chosen representations, targeted questioning and appropriate support or challenge.
We aim for learning to be challenging yet attainable. Children who require additional support are given the scaffolding needed to access the mathematics, while those who demonstrate secure understanding are challenged to reason more deeply, make connections and apply their knowledge in increasingly sophisticated ways.
Strong Foundations
We recognise that secure foundational knowledge is essential for future success in mathematics. In line with the Department for Education’s emphasis on stronger foundations, we prioritise secure number sense, arithmetic, multiplication facts and other essential mathematical knowledge.
Our curriculum is carefully planned to revisit and build upon important prior learning. Developing fluency and automaticity in key knowledge enables children to focus their attention on reasoning, problem solving and increasingly complex mathematical ideas.
Our Daily Mathematical Offer
Alongside our core mathematics curriculum, children experience regular opportunities to revisit, practise and apply essential mathematical knowledge.
Fluent in Five supports daily arithmetic fluency and retrieval, while Rapid Reasoning ensures children are regularly exposed to reasoning and problem-solving questions. We also use the Number Sense Maths Times Tables Fluency programme, following its carefully structured sequence to systematically develop secure and automatic recall of multiplication and division facts.
Together, these approaches ensure that fluency, reasoning, problem solving and multiplication knowledge are not taught in isolation, but are revisited regularly as part of children’s mathematical learning.
Our Mathematics Curriculum
Our mathematics curriculum follows the National Curriculum and is informed by the NCETM Teaching for Mastery approach. Learning is carefully sequenced across Key Stage 2, balancing the development of fluency, reasoning and problem solving while building progressively upon children’s prior knowledge.