Adaptive Teaching

Within our Mastery approach to teaching maths at Balfour Primary School, pupils will move through the Maths curriculum broadly the same pace.  Adaptive teaching will be seen by the challenges that children access or by the support that they are given to access the learning.

Children who grasp the concepts more quickly are given opportunities to deepen their knowledge further by improving their reasoning skills rather than accelerating on to new curriculum content.  They will have deeper thinking questions and challenging reasoning problems to solve to ensure that they continue to make progress.  Struggling learners may have scaffolded work, or be supported by a peer or teacher, enabling them to access the lesson content and there will be some children who are using practical equipment for longer in order to support learning.  Our aim is that by supporting all learners, the gap between mathematical attainment in our classes will narrow.

Same day intervention

At Balfour we believe in ‘keeping up’ not ‘catching up’.  Assemblies are held two times a week and during this time, teachers work with children, in small groups, who they have identified as benefiting from pre-teaching.  It is so fun, we call it Maths club in KS1 and Masterclass in KS2!

Assessment

The class teacher is constantly assessing, through skilled questioning, by working with different groups of children on a daily basis and through live marking: that constant dialogue through which children can show their understanding.  At the end of each ‘block’, the children complete a short assessment, using a mixture of questions from the DfE Non-Statutory Mathematics Guidance and the White Rose end of Block assessments and teachers use these along with a range of assessment tools, strategies and resources to assess and inform their judgement.  Crucially, assessment is used to identify areas where children need further support and these would then be targeted through morning maths, small group teacher support or through pre-teaching. 

See below for the assessment grid which show the objectives which the children should meet in each year group.