Maths

What is our curriculum intent?

Mathematics teaching at Valence aims to equip students with the skills, tools, and understanding they need to acquire greater meaningful independence in day-to-day life. Greater meaningful independence will mean different things for each student and therefore outcomes aim to be personally significant, and teaching is highly differentiated to meet the individual needs of the students to further develop their mathematical fluency. One student may be aiming to independently order food in the home living area, while another student might be working towards gaining a GCSE qualification in order to go to college.  Our aim is to support our students to develop both their confidence in and independent use of maths in the wider world.

How does the delivery of our curriculum differ between the pathways?

The Simmonds Curriculum aims to provide opportunities for students to secure a foundational understanding of mathematics through the provision of concrete, digital, and written learning opportunities. Students are provided with opportunities to engage in mastery for maths questions where appropriate for their attainment levels. Maths is delivered in a cross-curricular way, where students engage in maths learning in maths, independence, and cooking lessons. Students have opportunities to use and apply the knowledge in real life, i.e. in the Valence residential area and the wider community. Students in the Simmonds pathway will either complete an OCR Entry Level in a maths examination or they will complete ASDAN qualifications throughout the academic year.

In the Hawking pathway, teaching follows a mastery of mathematics approach to the curriculum, which means that there is a focus on greater depth of learning for a given topic rather than greater breadth of the curriculum. The objective is for all students to have a foundational understanding of each topic before moving on in the sequence of learning. Students develop fluency in mathematical procedures as well as the ability to reason about their answers and to problem solve. Mathematics is taught at a level which is appropriate for students’ current attainment in the short-term and highly aspirational in the long-term. KS3 students build core number skills, develop number sense, and strategies for reasoning and problem solving in preparation for a gaining an Entry Level or GCSE qualification in the future.

Do our students have access to learning opportunities outside the classroom?

In maths, we are aware of the importance of teaching outside of the classroom and the enrichment that this can offer to our students, and this is factored into our teaching. Therefore, students in the Simmonds pathway have focused on different types of leaves when learning about handling data. In the Hawking pathway, students have used trundle wheels and meter rulers to learn about units of measurements (centimetres, metres, and kilometres). Furthermore, we are working on utilising the orienteering resource in PE in our teaching of bearings and scale drawings.