Our Vision

At The Vineyard, we aim to ensure that every young person, regardless of background, has a rich and meaningful mathematics education. As a school, we aspire, through our values, to develop well-rounded, independent individuals, preparing them with life-enriching mathematical learning experiences. We propose that all children should be curious in how they look to discover new concepts, courageous in their desire to challenge themselves and caring in their approach to collaborative learning. By the time they leave us to go to secondary school, our aim is for all children to enjoy maths and have a secure, deep and lasting understanding of fundamental mathematical concepts and procedures, including their applications to the wider world. 

In line with the National Curriculum and current best practice, we aim to ensure that all students:

• 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 nonroutine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.

Our Approach

Mathematics lessons at The Vineyard follow a ‘Maths Mastery’ approach which allows children to work practically using various resources, models and concepts. In our day-to-day teaching, we follow the six part lesson model: Do Now, New Learning, Talk Task, Develop Learning, Independent Task and Plenary. This keeps the lesson pacy, gives flow and allows more opportunities to teach creatively, give feedback and assess learning. Due to a whole class, step-by-step teaching approach, children at The Vineyard are able to move through the curriculum at broadly the same pace. Children are given time to fully understand, explore and apply ideas, rather than accelerate through new topics. This approach enables our children to truly grasp a concept, and the challenge comes from ‘diving deeper’ and investigating the concept in new, alternative and more complex ways. At The Vineyard, we follow the White Rose purposefully sequenced scheme of learning in Early Years, Key Stage One and Key Stage Two to guide our journey towards mastery in mathematics.

Teaching for Mastery at The Vineyard has small steps and CPA (concrete, pictorial, abstract) at its core. We ensure that all learning is broken down into small connected steps so that accessing lessons is manageable for all, cognitive overload is reduced and students are able to make connections in their learning. When introduced to a key new concept, all students are given the opportunity to build competency in this topic by taking a concrete, pictorial, abstract approach. Students begin by having the opportunity to use concrete objects and manipulatives to help them understand what they are doing. They build on this concrete approach by using pictorial representations, which can then be used to reason and solve problems. With the foundations firmly laid, students can move to an abstract approach using numbers and key concepts with confidence. Because of our CPA approach, children learn to see the connections in maths and understand that mathematics can be represented in different ways.

At the Vineyard, we acknowledge that children benefit from having a bank of ‘basics’ that they have learnt to automaticity, and can use in solving other mathematical problems. Through KIRFs (Key Instant Recall Facts) lessons, we support the development of mental maths skills that underpin much of the maths work in our school. Using a ‘little and often’ approach, children are taught how to learn and practise these key mathematical facts and apply them with limited demands on working memory.