1. Completing the Square:
The Importance of a National Policy for Mathematics 5-19
Jackie Fairchild
Assistant Headteacher
Gosford Hill School
ACME Annual Conference 2011

2. Understanding for Opportunity
Many people say what they want students to be able to do, but far fewer engage with how we can help students to develop the understanding to make this possible.

3. Deep Understanding
Transfer
Choices
Connectivity

4. Deep Understanding
Ways of working
All students contribute

5. Policy Making for Opportunity
Examinations tow teaching because schools are accountable for performance which ultimately affects the life chances of students.
Through policy making, there is an opportunity to guide the learning experiences students have in the classroom. If deep conceptual links are built into policy explicitly then they will find their way into textbooks, into the classroom and onto examination papers.

6. A Curriculum of Opportunity
Curriculum focus on core concepts
Connectivity emphasised explicitly
Exam questions
Published resources

7. Functional Skills: Friend or Foe
Procedural
Unrealistic contexts on mathematics papers
The subjects across the curriculum give natural ways of applying mathematics in context
Apply and examine mathematical functionality in useful and agreed contexts across the curriculum
Equal opportunity

8. My Priorities for Deep Understanding
Students generate their own examples

9. My Priorities for Deep Understanding
Students generate their own examples
Equivalence

10. My Priorities for Deep Understanding
Students generate their own examples
Equivalence
Shifting from one form of representation to another
Understanding the laws of arithmetic and how these are generalised in algebra
Generalising

11. My Priorities for Deep Understanding