Mathematical skills are essential to everyday life. Our aim is to maximise the potential of our children’s understanding and knowledge. Teachers encourage children to develop skills using an interactive approach, providing opportunities for children to develop their calculation skills, test the reasonableness of their answers and to solve numerical problems confidently. We want all children at Trinity St Mary’s to grow into confident and competent mathematical thinkers, who are able to use maths in real life situations.

At Trinity St. Mary’s we aim to inspire all children to have a love of mathematics. We also specifically aim to:
 Develop a positive approach to the learning of mathematics by providing challenge, personal attainment and a sense of achievement.
 Create confident children who are able to express, question and discuss ideas when undertaking activities.
 Develop skills of mental arithmetic in order to support and enhance mental calculations, check answers and foster an understanding of the relationships in mathematics.
 Use practical and investigative approaches where possible in order to strengthen understanding of pattern and relationships.
 Use mathematics to explore everyday situations and to communicate with others.
 Develop mathematical vocabulary and use of equipment appropriately.
 Involve and inform parents and carers of strategies to help their children.

The national curriculum identifies three main aims in the primary phase:
 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.
 reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language.
 can 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.

Planning is taken from the White Rose maths scheme and their lesson overviews are used to inform planning. In books, children will be given up to 3 layers of questions linked to the mastery approach of fluency (purple box), reasoning (green box) and problem solving (blue box). The coloured boxes allow for children to work through the layers applying their growing understanding of mathematical concepts in a range of different situations.