At Dame Bradbury’s we have high aspirations for success for every child. Teaching for mastery in maths is the expectation that all pupils will gain a deep understanding of the maths they are learning. For understanding in maths to be secure, learning needs to be built on solid foundations.

We employ a ‘build it, draw it, write it, say it’ approach to our maths and use both concrete objects and pictorial representations, plus digital learning through apps such as Explain Everything, to help our children to model and visualise maths problems. We also use maths-based games to consolidate our pupils learning and promote enjoyment of maths.

Problem solving and reasoning are central to our approach and opportunities are given for pupils to calculate with confidence, ensuring an understanding of why it works so that pupils understand what they are doing rather than just learning to repeat routines without grasping what is happening.

Our aim is to build our pupils confidence in maths by encouraging them to have a growth mindset. Mathematical abilities can be developed by everyone - they might just not understand it yet!