The Mathematics Department is committed to providing excellent teaching and endeavours to ensure that all students of varying abilities and interests should be given the opportunity to achieve their full potential in Mathematics at all levels.
Mathematics is an inter-connected subject in which pupils need to be able to move fluently between representations of Mathematical ideas. The principles on which we base our teaching must support the intent of our Mathematics curriculum and must realise the manner in which it should be implemented to allow our students to acquire the knowledge and skills they require for life and achieve the best possible outcomes.
We believe that Mathematics provides opportunities for students to be both creative and independent, but it also allows for co-operation and debate to take place through logical thinking. It enables communication to be precise, elegant and informed. Teaching Mathematics for mastery involves employing approaches that help students to develop a deep and secure knowledge and understanding of Mathematics at each stage of their learning, so that by the end of every year or key stage, students will have acquired mastery of the mathematical processes and concepts they they’ve been introduced to, equipping them to move on confidently and securely to more advanced material. In order to develop understanding, students connect new knowledge with existing knowledge. Students also need to develop fluency and automatically apply their knowledge as skills.
As the national curriculum states:
“Mathematics is a creative and highly inter-connected discipline that has been developed over centuries, providing the solution to some of history’s most intriguing problems. It is essential to everyday life, critical to science, technology and engineering, and necessary for financial literacy and most forms of employment. A high-quality mathematics education therefore provides a foundation for understanding the world, the ability to reason mathematically, an appreciation of the beauty and power of mathematics, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject.”
At SJH our aims are for students to:
• Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.
• Be able to reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language.
• Be able to solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.
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