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Success
We have had many successes this year. Our children have a
greater knowledge of number, and in many year groups this has
transferred into a greater use of mental strategies when
completing calculations. The children in Key Stage 1 and lower
Key Stage 2 have fully embraced the approach and are
competent in using models to decode problems; consequently,
they have developed their mathematical thinking. I was beaming
with pride as I marked the Key Stage 1 maths papers as the
children applied all of the skills they had been taught. Our
higher ability children excelled and demonstrated a deep
understanding, whilst a small group of children that in the past
would have scraped ARE, proved they had become confident
mathematicians and applied themselves in the test. However,
our Year Six children’s previous habits were hard to break. In
hindsight, would I have rolled out the approach differently and
only focused on Key Stage 1? I think I still would have done the
same as I strongly feel that the children have left our school
understanding mathematical concepts better than they did
previously.
Integrated learning
We plan to continue our journey following a mastery approach,
and a key focus will be developing our staff’s knowledge and
learning to dissect mathematical approaches. We aim to
introduce teachers to working in triads to observe lessons and
discuss the approaches afterwards. This will follow a similar
approach to the Teacher Research Groups (TRG) that I will be
continuing to run next year. Also, we have further developed
our plans based on our learning from this year. As the year
progressed, many teachers were discussing how they would link
more topics to number and calculation rather than teach these
as stand-alone topics.
Conversion between metric measures is a prime example of
this. Plans have also been put in place for the number strand
of the curriculum ready for September based on these
reflections. Lesson design is vital, and this will be our
primary focus in the next academic year. Crafting lessons by
using a range of representations and controlling variation is
the key to delivering a highly effective mastery curriculum.
I would strongly recommend that primary schools adopt this
approach to maths; however, I strongly believe that Mastery
in Maths is not just a scheme to follow. It is about having
highly skilled teachers that can teach tricky concepts in a
controlled way. The 5 ‘big ideas’ as set out by the NCETM is
a guide to some of the elements of mastery, and should not
be seen as a tick list. I look forward to seeing our children
develop as mathematicians next year. I hope that they come
back in September showing a good understanding in this
subject and that the time spent this year deepening their
understanding begins to pay its rewards •
About the author, Paul Johnson
Paul has been teaching for over 15 years in a number of
Primary Schools, and has led Maths for the past 11 years.
Throughout this time, he has always been passionate about
children developing a deep understanding of concepts
rather than being taught mathematical rules. He is a PD Lead
and Maths SLE, and has delivered training to a number of
schools on the use of models and representations. He
continues to develop his own practice and is now a NCETM
Primary Mastery Specialist.
Page 18 | Issue 3 | innovatED | Autumn 2019
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