Our aim at Sir Thomas Boteler Church of England High School is to offer an ambitious and well-sequenced Mathematics curriculum, which is rich in declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge. It is designed to spark curiosity, build resilience and prepare students well for every-day life and for future employment.
The curriculum is accessible for all students through instructional teaching, given in small steps. This allows students to achieve success at each small step and build a positive attitude towards their learning of Mathematics.
The curriculum is designed so that as students move through the curriculum, they continually upgrade. Within each unit of work, topics are sequenced logically so that knowledge builds upon prior knowledge: prior knowledge is revisited before then building upon it to avoid cumulative disfluency. The order in which units of work appear within the curriculum are designed to build in forgetting time to allow for retrieval from the long-term memory to support students in knowing and remembering more.
The curriculum provides opportunities for students to:
- become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics through varied and frequent practice,
- reason mathematically by explaining their method and process using mathematical vocabulary,
- solve problems by breaking them down into smaller steps and persevering in seeking a solution.
Through the delivery of our curriculum, we follow several mastery principles. This includes spending sufficient time on a topic to deepen understanding, making connections between topics, and the essential belief that all students are capable of understanding, doing and improving at Mathematics. To help students to achieve mastery of topics, the content is delivered explicitly, and regular retrieval activities and revisiting of topics is built into the curriculum.