Our vision for Maths in St. Michael’s sees all children having a positive attitude towards Maths and recognising its purpose and value to their future.  Children will be confident calculators and determined problem solvers.  To achieve this goal it will be necessary for standards to continue to be raised as we expertly identify and fill learning gaps from prior learning when pupils arrive with us so that the Maths curriculum can be taught at the correct pace through the rest of the school. 

Maths builds ASPIRATION by:

Helping children recognise that they need to be in control of the quality of their work in Maths.  They move beyond writing answers and waiting to be told if they are ‘right or wrong’ and on to find ways of checking their answers.  They learn to know when common sense or mathematical inverses support them in doing this or when simply entering their answer into the context of the question helps them at least see if the answer needs further thought.

Maths builds BELIEF by:

Providing children with problem-solving opportunities that will grow their belief that they can find a way forward in many different challenging contexts.  As they will have experienced many occasions where they are presented with problems in Maths which, at first, they are unable to find a way to a solution, they will understand that simply by trying a variety of methods and using the previous attempts to inform the next attempt,  they can solve what may, at first, have seemed impossible.

Maths builds CREATIVITY by:

Setting complex tasks that require the child to try a multitude of approaches before finding a solution.  They discover that fluency is an important part of creativity and going through the cycle of ‘attempt, review, refine’ will help them move towards success.    This supports the children to move on from their concept of Maths when they arrive at the school which is more ‘look at the question, think about it, write down the answer’.

St Michael’s is a Rights Respecting school which believes that supporting children’s development of character and values, including the core British values of democracy, mutual respect, liberty and the rule of law, is an essential part of equipping young people to thrive as citizens in the world of the future. Maths actively supports this by:

• Recognising individual liberty through encouraging and celebrating problem solving;

• A respect for the order and the beauty of number and patterns which are woven through maths;  

• Celebrating mistakes and respecting difference in our approaches to learning

• Celebrating academic success as a key to equipping pupils to play a full role in the world of the future

If you are working well in this subject these are the skills you are learning:

• Problem solving

• Pattern finding

• Accurate calculating

• Analysing skills to help identify the most efficient way to solve a problem or calculate

• Determination – to see problems through (especially in ‘find all possibility’ problems)

• Organisation – especially in puzzle solving but also in more complex calculating

If you like this subject then these are some of the jobs you can go on to:

• Good attainment in Maths is a pre-requisite to almost all further education so as a subject it opens the door to all careers that require academic achievement

• Engineer

• Accountant

• Statistician

• Almost anything that involves money