Progression Map

Progression of Skills and Knowledge for Maths

At Cannon Lane, we strive to create confident and fluent mathematicians, who can reason and who are able to apply their knowledge to solving problems in real life contexts. Our mathematics curriculum is organised into a logical progression of topics over a year (please see curriculum map). We spend time, within each year group, ensuring that children build strong foundations in their number skills. This ensures that they are ready to build on their knowledge and skills in the next part of their school life.

In our Early Years Foundation Stage, children are taught to develop strong foundations in their number skills. This is essential to allow all children to develop the necessary building blocks to excel mathematically throughout their school life and beyond. Children are taught to count confidently, develop a deep understanding of the numbers to 10 along with the relationships and patterns between them. Reception teachers provide a range of opportunities to build and apply this understanding throughout their week in school. The use of physical manipulatives is vital to develop a secure base of knowledge and vocabulary. In addition, our curriculum includes frequent opportunities for children to develop their reasoning skills across all areas of mathematics including shape, space and measures. Our aim in Reception is for children to develop positive attitudes and interests in mathematics and not be afraid to make mistakes. These skills are then transferred to Key Stage 1.

In Key Stage 1, the focus of our curriculum is to develop our children’s confidence and mental fluency with numbers. Our children will work with physical resources within lessons to help them consolidate their learning. This will support them in developing key skills such as: recognising, describing, drawing, comparing and sorting; and using the correct related vocabulary. An importance in placed on the knowledge of number bonds to 20 and their understanding of place value and this will aid fluency later on in their school life. As well as developing their fluency in number, they will also take time to learning different elements of measurement and geometry. These skills continued to be built on and developed in KS2.  

In Lower Key Stage 2 (Year 3 and 4), children focus on drawing on their continued fluency of working with whole numbers and retrieving their knowledge of place value so far to support them in understanding the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). This includes both the more efficient written and mental methods in line with their maths progression. The introduction of simple fractions and decimal place value support their understanding of parts of a whole.  Over the course of the year, children will develop their ability to solve a range of problems allowing for their development of mathematical reasoning. This gives them the opportunity to develop their analysing skills within their mathematical lessons. They are also introduced to statistics as a new topic, which helps support them in cross curricular lessons. By the end of Lower Key Stage 2, children should be able to recall their multiplication tables up to and including 12x12 with precision and fluency. This will support them with their learning in Upper Key Stage 2.

In Upper Key Stage 2, children focus on extending their understanding of the number system and place value. This develops the connections that pupils make between multiplication and division with fractions, decimals, percentages and ratio. Throughout Year 5 and 6, they will develop their ability to solve a wider, and increasingly complex, range of problems, drawing on their understanding of efficient written and mental methods of calculation. With their foundations in arithmetic that has been built over the course of their school life, pupils are introduced to the language of algebra as a means for solving a variety of problems. Their understanding of classify shapes is built upon by learning that includes more complex geometric properties the vocabulary they need to describe them.  By the end of their time at Cannon Lane, children should be fluent in the written methods for all four operations. This helps support their transition to secondary school where these skills and knowledge are deepened even more.

Children across the school will develop their ability to read and write mathematical vocabulary throughout the studying of each topic across every year group (please see vocabulary progression). The amount and level of vocabulary increases as they travel through the school and this goes hand in hand with their increasing reading and spelling knowledge (please see the Reading and Spellings Progression for more information).

The table below sets out the different objectives that children are taught throughout each year of their school life. For Key Stage 1 and 2, these are the National Curriculum objectives. For Reception, there are the Early Learning Goals (ELG) along with our personalised curriculum objectives. Time is taken in every year group to ensure they have time to consolidate and deepen their understanding of the objective of their year group. This allows them to have a strong understanding of the skills and knowledge of their year group before they move to the next one. Teachers take time to ensure there are cross-curricular links to other subject where possible and these can be found in purple.