At Bay Primary School we provide the right kind of teaching and support to ensure that every learner can gain an understanding and love of maths. Mathematics shouldn’t be a privilege.  The ability to succeed is not fixed and this is clear in both our lesson design and inclusive class teaching.  We aim to develop a positive attitude towards maths in all our learners by helping them to acquire core knowledge and experience success from the very beginning of their time at our school.  This empowers them to become more self-confident in their ability which leads to greater enjoyment of the subject.

We promote a mastery approach to the teaching of mathematics, focusing on depth of understanding before breadth and employ the ‘Maths – No Problem!’ evidence-based quality textbook, based on the Singapore approach to teaching mathematics, to help us achieve this consistently throughout the school. Children are given time to really master key mathematical ideas and concepts placing problem solving at the heart of mathematics.  Throughout mathematics lessons, children will be given purposeful tasks so that they can connect mathematics to the real world.  They will develop their knowledge of the facts, concepts, and rules (declarative knowledge) and the methods and algorithms (procedural knowledge), that give them the ability and confidence to reason and solve problems (conditional knowledge).

Mathematics has its own unique language, and we focus on supporting children to develop their mathematical vocabulary. When you enter a maths lesson at Bay Primary school, pupils will be engaged in exploratory talk and exchanging ideas using vocabulary that has been modelled, encouraged, and developed by their teachers, so that they can clearly explain their thinking and working in maths.  Pupils will be given opportunities to deepen their understanding of mathematics by having opportunities to use concrete objects and manipulatives so that they better understand the more abstract maths concepts; building on the concrete approach by using pictorial representatives to reason and solve problems; ultimately, moving on to an abstract approach using numbers and key concepts with confidence so they can use language to reason and explain their understanding. Emphasising the high value of mathematics education to all staff, governors, pupils, parents and carers is key to our children becoming successful mathematicians.   All staff actively work to improve their pedagogical understanding of mathematics and promote a love of mathematics in their classrooms.