Mathematics at Telford Park School is a forward-thinking department that puts pupils' learning and experiences first. The department intent is to make Mathematics as accessible and as rewarding as possible from the very start of pupils' time with us in Year 7, whilst giving every pupil the strongest mathematical grounding for examinations and beyond.
We aim to give all pupils at Telford Park School access to a curriculum that builds fluency, reasoning and problem solving in equal measure. A method is broken down and modelled one step at a time, and no lesson moves on until the number work it rests on has been checked. We hope that their experience of the subject will allow them to explain their thinking with confidence and to see just how fascinating and useful mathematics can be. Our curriculum is planned around how memory works: new ideas are introduced a few at a time so that pupils are not overloaded, and are revisited often so that knowledge moves into long-term memory and stays there.
It is vital that within Mathematics, our pupils experience the subject as one connected whole. From the very first week of Year 7, sequences lead into function machines and function machines into equations, and the proportional reasoning of Key Stage 3 underpins the demands of GCSE. We frequently reassess our curriculum to ensure that all our students leave having had access to the full breadth of the subject, be it calculating speed, distance and time, managing money through percentages and compound interest, or using Pythagoras' theorem and trigonometry. We aim to develop students' abilities as independent problem solvers, prepared for the challenges encountered in later life.