How does Big Maths work?
The Big Maths framework is based upon the natural progression of maths; heavily influenced, inspired and informed by the work of leading educationalists, researchers and practitioners. To create the Big Maths framework we;
- Began by identifying more than 1,200 small steps that a child takes on their maths learning journey;
- Created Progress Drives to organise these steps into a framework of skills leading to larger objectives;
- Organised the Progress Drives into sections of skills, like Counting Skills;
- Allocated the Progress Drives to either the Basic Skills and Wider Maths skills frameworks.
CLIC & SAFE
To make things a little more friendly to navigate and reference, we adopted the acronyms CLIC and SAFE:
Basic Skills:
Wider Maths Skills:
Counting
Learn Its
It’s Nothing New
Calculation
Shape
Amounts
Fractions
Explaining Data
Progress Drives and Small Steps
A Progress Drive is a sequence of small steps of learning that lead to a larger objective. Each small step is mapped to a Year and Term, guided by the expectations of your curriculum. This makes tracking pupil progress (and attainment) and lesson planning simple, particularly when you use Big Maths Online. Each step has a Learning Objective and ‘Remember To’s, the success criteria for that objective. This image shows all of the Progress Drives, beginning with Reception in the Centre and ending at Year 6 or Primary 7 on the outer circle, illustrating how detailed the Big Maths framework is.
Big Maths works in Small Steps!
The number of steps varies by progress drive, in our Place Value progress drive for example, there are just 5 steps. This image shows each step, with its Learning Objective, ‘Remember To’s and the Year and Term that it is mapped to in the English National Curriculum.
Big Maths works because our steps are deliberately small, to avoid any gaps for pupils to ‘fall into’, whilst allowing teachers to ‘nudge’ understanding forwards. This model affords children the time and focus to ensure they secure skills in long-term memory.
‘I do’, ‘We do’, ‘You do’ Teaching
We advocate the ‘I do’, ‘We do’, ‘You do’ (also known as the Gradual Release model) approach to teaching, which begins with teachers introducing a skill and finishes with learners working independently. Children should be guided from:
- ‘I do’ where the teacher models the new skill, to
- ‘We do’ where the teacher scaffolds and guides learners to build confidence, gauging their readiness to work independently with the new skill, to then
- ‘You do’ where the focus is on ensuring learners are now able to carry out the new skill independently.
Once learners can use the new skill independently, our ‘Spaced Practice Resources’ allow them to ‘Do It Again’ (and again…), practising the skill so that they can use it with confidence in real life. We want all children to develop excellent fluency and mental maths skills, so we encourage teachers to focus on what children know and what they are ready to learn, rather than being lead blindly by expectations based on their age.
What do your pupils know?
We recommend that you begin with a Baseline Assessment when introducing Big Maths as this allows you to identify and focus on the most basic learning gaps for each child, rapidly establishing a solid foundation of basic skills. Once implemented, pupils enjoy completing Beat That! challenges each week which confirm the impact of that week’s teaching and inform planning for the coming weeks. The first few weeks of implementation target:
- The Learning Gaps identified in your baseline assessments,
- The spread of ability in your class,
- The Gap to Age Related Expectations, and
- Establishing the weekly routines of Assess > Plan > Teach
For more information about our assessment system ‘Big Maths Beat That!’ please Click Here
We do not subscribe to planning lessons based simply on chronological age like most approaches.
Curriculum Aims for Mathematics
Traditionally every curriculum has prioritised the 3 Rs – Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic, targeting a solid foundation in each area. Arithmetic is an elementary branch of mathematics that studies numerical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In recent years, primary curriculums have become increasingly saturated, not just with additional subjects, but within subjects, and maths is no exception.
There are vast differences between the curriculum in England, which focuses on whether pupils have specific elements of knowledge, and those in Scotland and Wales which focus on the development of skills and competencies. To read more about how Big Maths works with your curriculum visit the maths curriculum page.
We believe that ‘the fundamentals of mathematics’ are better described as Basic Skills, or Numeracy, essentially those skills required to be confident about the maths we encounter in real-life. Teachers should focus on Basic Skills (CLIC) and the progress that children are making!
A Whole School
Maths Framework
Built on Basic Skills
Curriculum Mapping
Within the Big Maths framework we recognise more than 1,000 small steps of progression. As a result of this detail, we can accurately map all of the expectations of your curriculum to our framework.
Our planning tools allow you to see all of the steps that are aligned to each term so you can decide when and what you want to teach, considerate of the needs of your pupils. For every term we show you new learning objectives and steps that we suggest you revisit because they are either pre-requisite or complementary to the new learning objectives that term.
Bespoke Teacher Notes and Resources
In Big Maths Online, you can access over 15,0000 bespoke resources to support teaching and learning. Each step has it’s own resources, with specific Teacher Notes that clarify the objective of that step. Most steps have bespoke resources including (where appropriate):
- Lesson PowerPoints
- Spaced Practice Resources
- Classroom Displays
- Prove It! Activities
We help you to teach!
We give you tools and resources that help you to plan and teach your pupils, including:
- Identification of Learning Gaps
- Lesson Planning tools
- Over 15,000 resources
- Assessment and Tracking reports
Ever Improving!
We are always investing in Big Maths Online to improve performance, resources and tools to support you. We value feedback and requests from our family of teachers and school leaders, often incorporating these into our development plans. In 2024, we have introduced a new Home Learning website, and a Pupil Feedback feature as a direct result of teachers’ requests.
