ABSTRACT
There is a need to show how the curriculum content that the school chooses to teach complies with national statutory requirements. This normally means ensuring that the planning shows how all the learning objectives required in each Key Stage receive appropriate attention: and in mathematics this is a major undertaking. Many schools have chosen to do this in what they call their medium-term planning documents. It is this planning that is the most complex, onerous and difficult to carry out, as it shows how learning objectives will be linked to classroom activities. Schools tend to diversify here. Schools that see published schemes as defining an appropriate curriculum and thus rely heavily on published scheme material for their teaching tend to identify parts of their chosen scheme resources as providing access to the learning objectives. My argument is that a curriculum should not be defined by a published scheme but must include the actual teaching behaviour or style of the teachers, along with opportunities for practical work and the proper development of the learning objectives related to using and applying. Schools that have taken an approach which is less dependent on published schemes tend to identify areas of mathematical knowledge, concepts and skills and match these to the learning objectives. This latter group of schools may also tend to provide more practical work for children since once the knowledge, concepts and skills are mapped against the learning objectives, a whole range of supporting activities and resources can be crossreferenced.
