Find out more about our maths curriculum and read our FAQs
Introduction
We’ve been working closely with curriculum partners, subject experts and teachers and have released our interactive maths curriculum plan. You can also download the plan to use offline to help with your planning.
Our curriculum partner for maths is:
- Maths primary and secondary: Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI)
You can read more about how our expert groups helped shape our curriculum thinking in our Blog: Collaborating with our maths expert group.
Find out more about how to use our interactive curriculum plans and adapt them for your school in our Guide to our new curricula.
Curriculum explainer
We've recently added a curriculum explainer to our maths curriculum to help you understand our thinking when we were making them with our curriculum partner.
For maths this will help you understand:
- our overarching curriculum approach and the subject principles we used
- how our curriculum reflects the aims and purpose of the national curriculum
- information on delivering it in your school
- how we use threads to provide curriculum coherence.
More about our maths curriculum
In our secondary maths curriculum video, our maths subject lead Ed Southall, explores the key thinking behind the creation of our secondary maths curriculum with Vicky Wheelhouse from MEI.
When will all the resources be available?
All of our new lesson planning and resources for primary and secondary maths are now available on our website.
Our new units and lessons all have a ‘New’ label beside them.
You can see what lessons we are covering in each unit by clicking into the unit information on the unit sequence page.
You also have the option of the Foundation or Higher tier at KS4.
What's happening with our older maths resources?
All of our older maths resources, that were released before September 2022, will remain available until the end of the 2025 summer term.
If you have used any of our older English resources to plan for the 24/25 academic year, please make sure you download what you need by the end of the 2025 summer term.
FAQs
What is the approach to fluency, reasoning and problem solving in this curriculum? Are they embedded within all lessons?
We build in problem solving throughout units whilst also drawing specific attention to it within particular lessons that focus on features of solving specific types of problem and exploring the efficacy of different methods.
Similarly, lessons are designed to embed discussion and question prompts that explore why pupils believe answers are correct or how they might begin to approach new problems.
We acknowledge that to develop fluency in mathematics, practice is critical and whilst topics and themes are revisited in our curriculum we encourage teachers to ensure that there are opportunities to regularly practice doing mathematics beyond the scope of our lessons through, for example, homework activities.
How do I know whether to allow use of calculators within a unit or lesson?
It is at a teacher's discretion whether they decide to allow for calculators to use for each unit, however some lessons will explicitly signal how to complete calculations using a calculator alongside written calculation methods.
Does the maths curriculum encourage the use of manipulatives?
Yes, absolutely. We built one of our subject principles around the 'Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract' approach. and our curriculum is designed so that pupils have lots of opportunities to work with a range of different manipulatives.
What manipulatives are recommended for use with the maths curriculum?
We consistently use a range of manipulatives across our curriculum, particularly at key stage 1, such as Rekenreks, bead strings, multilink cubes and Dienes blocks. Typically the manipulatives we use align with the Non-Statutory guidance for the DfE programmes of study.
How do you differentiate lessons and content for Key Stage 4 middle and higher achievers?
We anticipate that teachers using the Foundation strand of our key stage 4 curriculum will likely need to further support some learners, depending on their starting point, at different times during the teaching of our units by providing further practice or revisiting topics.
Similarly, students taking the Higher GCSE route will have access to a large amount of lessons covering the full content of the Programme of Study - some of which may be less relevant to students depending on their starting point. As such we recommend that teachers determine which lessons within units are most suitable for the class in front of them, utilising their own schools' teaching allocations for maths to plan a full year of content.