Maths

We believe that pupils deserve a creative, supportive and ambitious maths curriculum that is rich both in skills and knowledge. Our curriculum develops a fluency in the mathematical fundamentals, provides a toolkit for generalisation and abstraction that allows pupils to problem solve, and promotes pupils to think and reason mathematically.

We aim to become the catalyst for their curiosity and prepare them well for the maths that will be vital in future employment and everyday life.

Staff and Facilities

Our Head of Maths, Miss Yates, leads our team of Maths teachers, Mr Harris, Mrs Holt, and Mr Risebrow. Our Maths department is located on the 2nd floor, with easy access to all our facilities including the Learning Resource Centre, and our dedicated ICT Suite.

Enrichment

Maths Support runs weekly after school. This provides opportunities for pupils to play games that involve applying maths, practice for the maths challenge and participate in national competitions or complete their homework with support from a teacher. There will also be some more focused sessions, which pupils may be personally invited to attend.

Each week pupils can use parallelogram.org.uk to complete puzzle solving activities which look at some challenging questions as well look at some of the exciting ways maths appears in the present and from the past.


Curriculum

Year 7 Curriculum

Pupils will revisit areas of maths they have previously been taught in primary school but look at the mathematics involved on a deeper level. They will be challenged and encouraged to answer “why?”, and through the depth of their learning they will acquire the knowledge to construct an argument with convincing reasoning. They will cement the foundations of their mathematical understanding by looking in depth at place value, written methods of calculations including fractions and decimals, and some key geometry skills. They will also be introduced to new topics and areas of mathematics, including basic algebra, and explore how their current knowledge can be built upon and applied to these.

Year 8 Curriculum

Maths in Year 8 revisits many areas of maths from Year 7, this allows us to constantly revise previous learning whilst further building upon it. As in Year 7, we investigate each aspect that is taught in depth so that pupils can understand not only what works, but why. We ensure that we give credit to the mathematicians who made the discoveries we now use and teach pupils a little of the history of maths to try and spark their interest in investigating it further. As well as advancing the pupils’ knowledge in number work, algebra and geometry they also start to look at statistics and develop the skills needed to answer questions using a calculator accurately.

Year 9 Curriculum

Maths in Year 9 has a strong focus on algebra. All pupils at this point should have both a deep understanding of number sense and initial understanding of algebra to allow us to investigate it further. We spend time understanding proofs and their importance within this subject. We continue to recognise the discoveries of great mathematicians gone by and consider why their contributions are invaluable within maths. In year 9 pupils build upon all of the foundations from 7 and 8 and become more fluent in using graphs to solve problems and present statistical data.

GCSE Maths

At GCSE pupils continue their work across the five areas of number, algebra, ratio, geometry and probability & statistics.

Pupils will recap many of the aspects from Key Stage 3, and now use their core skills to conjecture or solve increasingly sophisticated problems.

Pupils taking the Higher GCSE paper will start to develop many of the skills that will be necessary to study maths or other subjects at further education.