What is mastery?

The mastery approach means acquiring a deep, long-term, secure and adaptable understanding of the subject. This enables each learner to move on to apply their learning in lots of different contexts and in other subject areas. Since mastery is what we want pupils to acquire, we use the phrase ‘mastery approach’ to describe our classroom practice and organisation that combine to give pupils the best chances of mastering mathematics.

Curriculum aims:

• Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that children have conceptual understanding and are able to recall and apply their 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.