Maths

Airedale Academy’s Mathematics Curriculum Intent:

• Ensures that topics are sequenced effectively, through a detailed scheme of work which incorporates a strategic approach to the learning of each topic, enabling pupils to build their knowledge and skills over time, and exposing pupils to a rich and broad Curriculum. Teachers are aware of what we teach and the rationale behind why we teach these concepts in a certain order.
• Provides a breadth of learning opportunities for all pupils and celebrates the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities through a variety of learning styles, incorporating a mastery approach.
• Encourages subject specialists to teach content in its totality and constantly refer to the ‘why’ techniques work, encouraging pupils to make connections between ideas and topics.
• Recognises the importance of extra-curricular opportunities for all pupils to attend, to allow pupils to build on their developing knowledge through high quality after school learning.
• Is taught by subject specialists who have a passion for Mathematics, and more importantly a passion to develop our pupils in a subject that underpins a variety of subjects, helping them to become multi-skilled individuals.
• Underpins the expectations of the National Curriculum, and meets the varied needs of our pupils.
• Values quality first teaching which ensures pupils understand underlying Mathematical principles and can apply them in a variety of familiar and unfamiliar contexts. We prioritise the teaching of high value topics, such as rounding and negative numbers, and therefore revisit this throughout our KS3 and KS4 schemes to increase pupils’ exposure to these key areas.
• Provides a consistent approach to objective led learning, where pupils feel stretched to achieve their best and are aware of the goal of every lesson.
• Ensures subject specialists study the scheme of work through both key stages for Mathematics, and allows all our teachers to focus on embedding challenge, metacognition and memory techniques into our individual lessons.
• Values the need to interleave real life applications of Mathematics to pupils whenever possible.
• Addresses potential areas of difficulty at the outset. Lessons are then planned to address potential areas of difficulty and to remove barriers to pupils’ achievement.
• Embeds knowledge and skills by promoting strategies, including retrieval practice of previous units covered (SSDD tasks) and recall Do It Now tasks to allow pupils to link between topics. Lessons are planned with time for reflection, checking understanding and rectifying misconceptions.
• Promotes pupils’ independent thinking and the value of writing down model solutions, and teaches strategies for retention of knowledge, such as our knowledge organisers.
• Provides opportunities for collaborative thinking, as well as creative solutions. Pupils are explicitly taught strategies to solve problems and are encouraged by teacher modelling to be able to express themselves in Mathematical language.
• Ensures that assessment is extremely clear in both key stages to allow learners to improve independently as well as through verbal feedback.
• Provides effective formative assessment opportunities to check that knowledge and skills are embedded and mastered, prior to exposing pupils to new content and skills, particularly using diagnostic low stakes questions as mini plenary opportunities.
• Promotes whole class feedback and DIRT time, in order to address individual and whole-class misconceptions which are kept individually for each student, alongside their assessed pieces throughout their time at KS3 and KS4.
• Exposes pupils to an enriched Tier 3 vocabulary and provides opportunities to embed and apply new vocabulary through the Vocabulary Vault; keywords as such are highlighted in our scheme of work and in our Curriculum Plan.
• Recognises the importance of non-calculator methods in the subject, whilst also allowing pupils to effectively use a scientific calculator. 2 out of 3 of their final exams are calculator-based papers.

• Our main priority at Airedale Academy is to teach an enriching curriculum that is underpinned by the four key themes of Number, Ratio & Proportion, Algebra, Geometry and Statistics & Probability.
• We cover the OCR GCSE Specification in Maths, which varies slightly from the KS4 Maths National Curriculum, throughout KS3 and KS4.
• The entirety of the KS3 Maths National Curriculum is covered in Years 7-9, in order to provide pupils a well sequenced approach to their learning.
• We endeavour to build on our pupils’ understanding of content learnt at KS2 level and refer to prior learning in our Schemes of Work in order for subject specialists to extend our pupils’ depth of knowledge in the subject area.
• We want pupils to aim towards being able to apply learning to more challenging problems using a Variation Theory approach within most lessons, as appropriate to their ability. Pupils are taught a model example/s and the following activities provide opportunities for pupils to unearth misconceptions and be continually challenged.
• We provide resources including Knowledge Organisers for each annual scheme to help our pupils organise their learning.
• We expect pupils to identify errors in their work and make efforts to improve these independently through reflection/DIRT time.
• We expect pupils to use Tier 3 vocabulary in their responses, both in class discussion and in their written responses.

• We want every learner to leave our classroom with a wider understanding of the intertwining aspects of Mathematics, and be enthused by making connections.
• We want pupils to be independent and resilient learners with awareness of the importance of Mathematics within real life and beyond.
• By the end of Y10, quality first teaching of the entire GCSE specification should have been completed along with some revisiting of particular topics that pupils have struggled with. One of the two tiers, foundation and higher, will have been taught to the relevant pupils (dependent on their ability, but without limiting them at a too early stage).
• By the end of Y11 pupils will have increasingly been exposed to problem solving and exam style questions in which topics are mixed and pupils will be able to identify what maths they actually need to do when presented with a question.
• We want to ensure that our pupils have their best grade achievable when leaving us, allowing them to access their next pathway.

Here you can access the end of year revision for current Year 9’s

AA Powerpoint – Year 9 EOY Revision (1) (1)