All areas of our curriculum at Boldon School, is successfully adapted, designed and developed to be ambitious and meet the needs of all students. Each subject area develops their knowledge, skills and abilities to apply what they know and can do this with increasing fluency and independence.
Our teachers check pupils’ understanding systematically, identify misconceptions accurately and provide clear, direct feedback. They respond and adapt their teaching as necessary without unnecessarily elaborate or individualised approaches. This is to get the very best outcomes for our students whether they are SEND, disadvantaged or to challenge our higher ability students. This will ensure that students are ready for their next stage of education, employment or training to gain qualifications that allow them to go on to destinations that meet their interests and aspirations and the intention of their course of study.
How the Maths Curriculum supports our SEND students:
The Department for Education states, ‘Children and young people with SEND all have learning difficulties or disabilities that make it harder for them to learn than most children and young people of the same age. These children and young people may need extra or different help from that given to others.’
Boldon School is an inclusive school where every student is encouraged to develop a thirst for knowledge, to enjoy their curriculum and feel valued as a member of our school community. We are committed to the progress, inclusion and resilience of each student and support the learning journey that they require. Our curriculum is successfully adapted, designed or developed to be ambitious and meet the needs of pupils with SEND, developing their knowledge, skills and abilities to apply what they know and can do with increasing fluency and independence across all subject areas.
Students with SEND are supported in Maths through:
Differentiated tasks to enable all of our learners to access the work.
Scaffolding in maths tasks plays a critical role in allowing all students to access problems. Work is challenging but problems are carefully set up to give students the starting points they need to successfully complete the task. This support is removed as the learners confidence increases.
We combine visual and kinesthetic learning at allow all students to access tasks.
TA and HLTAs are deployed to have a positive impact on learning, students with the greatest SEND needs will benefit from the most access.
We work closely with our SENCO and the learning support team to identify the needs of all our students and how best to support them.
How the maths Curriculum supports our disadvantaged students:
The Secretary of State for Education set out the government’s national plan to support children and young people to reach their full potential, regardless of their backgrounds. With an overarching goal and aim of improving social mobility through education, and delivering better educational and career outcomes more evenly across England.
At Boldon School we have 50% of our students with high levels of deprivation, but strive to raise the attainment and aspirations of all students regardless of social background. We have a robust allocation system of pupil premium funding to obtain the most successful outcomes for our students and to narrow the gaps in attainment across all subject areas.
Disadvantaged students are supported in Maths through:
In maths identifying our disadvantaged students on seating plans and ensuring they are placed in positions to give them greatest access to teacher. Our analysis of student attainment focuses on disadvantaged students first. With those falling behind and intervention strategies identified.
In assessment, positive discrimination is used to ensure effective and detailed feedback is written in books.
Providing free revision guides, ensuring our disadvantaged students get access to 1 to 1 or small group intervention when required helps kick start good revision habits at KS4.
The whole-school teaching and Learning agenda allows for effective CPD and support to staff; this allows us to use a variety of strategies to help close gaps in learning.
How the maths Curriculum supports our higher ability students:
HM Chief Inspector stated, If we are going to succeed as an economy and as a society, we have to make more of our most able young people. We need them to become the political, commercial and professional leaders of tomorrow.
At Boldon school we aim to nurture scholastic excellence through a challenging curriculum where the work given to students is demanding and matches the aims of the curriculum in being coherently planned and sequenced towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge. We recognise the need to stretch and challenge all students but especially our MAT and higher ability students to obtain maximum progress.
Higher ability students are supported in maths and challenged every lesson through highly detailed schemes of learning that allow for stretch and challenge. We use BAR tasks, focusing on higher order thinking skills. Seating plans are arranged so that higher ability students are best situated to hone their skills and maximise learning potential.
In KS4 we raise aspirations with our most able learners by linking with Newcastle University to allow them to attend university lectures on diverse real life applications of maths and statistics. We work with AMSP to provide enrichment workshops designed to increase the number of students who study maths beyond GCSE. We also offer students an option to take a statistics GCSE in year 10 and Level 2 Certificate in further maths in year 11, to raise aspirations, regularly reflecting on the advantages of achieving the highest grades in maths.
In maths lessons we also:
Set students in all year groups allowing high ability learners to access the level of work and can stretch and challenge the most able.
Our work with higher ability students focusses on multi step problems that draw on knowledge and understanding from previous learning as well as new learning. These sort of problems are filtered down and scaffolded throughout all our sets to challenge the most able in any group regardless of their previous attainment.
We focus on increasing the complexity of tasks and proof instead of moving on too quickly, this allows students to build a deeper understanding of the subject. We offer bespoke and timely feedback, both within lessons and through marking of work.
Challenging multi step problems that combine different topics to deepen students’ understanding and allow students to develop problem solving and reasoning skills and help foster a love of learning. At Boldon we believe the best way to nurture and grow mathematical talent and interest is to pose challenging, stimulating problems which encourage deep mathematical thinking. We are also challenging high ability students first with directed questioning to focus on reasoning and understanding.