What do students study during Maths lessons at Melksham Oak Community School?
An overview of the Curriculum content our students cover, including that for Maths, can be found here for Key Stage 3
For Key Stage 4, our Curriculum content is located here:
Sparx Maths Homework
What extra-curricular opportunities are offered to learners?
In addition to classroom-based learning, we aim to provide students with opportunities for enrichment and extended learning.
This encompasses a range of clubs, including the Formula 1 Club.
In addition, we enter teams into the UK Maths Challenge. Within individual and team competitions, students are given the chance to explore some more challenging areas of maths, and solve puzzles in a competitive but supportive environment.
How does the Maths Curriculum contribute to our whole-school Curriculum intent?
The following is intended to explain how the Maths Curriculum at Melksham Oak Community School relates to the overarching intent for our Curriculum as a whole.
Maths is highly ambitious for all Melksham Oak learners because:
We provide students with a challenging Maths curriculum, which calls for greater depth of mathematical understanding at all levels and an emphasis on the need to problem solve and reason. We have placed greater importance on providing access to increasingly unfamiliar contexts and scenarios, in order to ensure that students’ application, cultural capital and confidence are developed.
In addition, our Maths curriculum aims to ensure that all students:
- Become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practise, with increasingly complex problems over time.
- Are able to reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, predicting relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language.
- Can solve problems by applying mathematical thinking to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication.
Our intention is that all students learn at a pace appropriate to them. This helps ensure that no child is left behind, as well as providing deeper and richer experiences for learners who grasp ideas more quickly.
We ensure our curriculum provides regular opportunities for checking students’ knowledge of pre-requisite skills and those that have been taught. This takes the form of regular low-stakes and summative assessments. These help to identify gaps in students’ mathematical knowledge, allow staff to provide feedback and feed into curriculum planning and teaching.
This enables all students to benefit from responsive and adaptive planning as we progress through each unit of work.
Our academic pathways ensure that all students have access to GCSE Maths (at either Higher or Foundation level), as well as the possibility of extending their studies further at A-level. To complement this, we implement a variety of strategic interventions to support students to achieve their very best.
Maths equips students with the knowledge and skills required for future success because:
Our Key Stage 3 Maths curriculum builds upon Key Stage 2 foundations in numeracy. Our curriculum is designed to support learners’ progression from Year 1 to Year 11 and beyond, building upon students’ prior knowledge and skills. This is partly achieving through the increasingly strong links we are forging with our feeder Primary schools.
Maths plays a crucial role as a gateway to further academic and career opportunities. Mathematical fluency and confidence in numeracy form the cornerstone of our curriculum. This is recognised by the amount of curriculum time dedicated to Maths at both Key Stage 3 and 4.
Our curriculum pathways enable all students to access GCSE Mathematics, maintaining breadth while enabling students to increasingly specialise as they progress towards post-16 options.
Our Maths curriculum develops students’ skills in number, geometry, algebra and statistics. These skills are carefully mapped and sequenced, so that students are able to revisit and develop them as they progress through Years 7-11. This also enables us to provide students with regular retrieval practice activities to promote knowledge recall and retention. This is supported by interleaving recurring themes which are taught at each stage of the Maths curriculum.
Maths helps students to broaden their opportunities and outlooks because:
Our curriculum is designed to provide both a wide breadth and depth of knowledge. We have placed growing emphasis upon providing access to increasingly unfamiliar contexts and scenarios, in order that students’ application, cultural capital and confidence are developed.
Our intention is to develop global citizens who are ready to overcome the challenges of tomorrow. In order to achieve this, our entire curriculum is designed to promote Melksham Oak’s shared values of respect, ambition and pride in everything we do. We encourage all learners to have high aspirations and levels of pride in their work. This is achieved through effective teacher behaviours, such as clear modelling of best practice, having high expectations of all students and personalised feedback. We also hope to raise aspirations through the use of challenging assessments, which prepare students for GCSE and increase student resilience.
Our aim is that students become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics and leave Melksham Oak with the necessary level of numeric competence, in order to succeed on their chosen path beyond school. We encourage out most able and enthusiastic Mathematicians to continue Maths at post-16, in order to become even better at thinking logically and analytically, developing resilience and thinking creatively and strategically. This should, in turn, enhance their employability skills and career opportunities.