At Long Mead Community Primary School and Bright Stars Nursery we recognise the importance of mathematics throughout each child’s everyday and future life. It enables children to understand relationships and patterns in both number and space in the world around them. It is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment. We intend to give each child the self-confidence and resilience to reach their full potential by ensuring that they have the tools to calculate fluently, reason logically, problem solve and think in abstract ways.

Maths is taught daily as part of continuous provision in Reception, through Mastery of Number and Power Maths in KS1 and using Power Maths in KS2. Power Maths is a government approved scheme that supports the teaching of mastery by breaking the learning down into small cumulative steps which builds a solid foundation of deep mathematical understanding. The teachers further adapt the scheme to tailor it completely to the learning needs of our children to ensure that all children are stretched and challenged at the appropriate level.

We want our children to realise that Maths is fun. We encourage an ‘I can’ culture in ‘mistake-friendly’ classrooms where mistakes are seen as a learning tool used to help us all to achieve. Proficiency in times tables is encouraged through weekly Times Table Rock Stars battles between classes. The winning class and highest scorers are celebrated as part of Fun Friday’s assembly.