What is White Rose?

White Rose – Teaching for Mastery

The White Rose overviews are designed to support a mastery approach to teaching and learning and have been designed to support the aims and objectives of the new National Curriculum.  

The overviews:

• have number at their heart.  A large proportion of time is spent reinforcing number to build competency
• ensure teachers stay in the required key stage and support the ideal of depth before breadth.
• ensure students have the opportunity to stay together as they work through the schemes as a whole group 
• provide plenty of opportunities to build reasoning and problem solving elements into the curriculum.

Concrete – Pictorial – Abstract

White Rose is built on the belief that all children, when introduced to a new concept, should have the opportunity to build competency by taking this approach.   

– children should have the opportunity to use concrete objects and manipulatives to help them understand what they are doing.

– alongside this, children should use pictorial representations.  These representations can then be used to help reason and solve problems.

– both concrete and pictorial representations should support children’s understanding of abstract methods.  

Planning guidance

• the curriculum is broken down into larger chunks to ensure there is the opportunity to teach the depth needed for mastery.
• Each unit is broken down into small steps. Breaking the curriculum down into small manageable steps should help children understand concepts better rather than trying to cover too many concepts at once and this can lead to cognitive overload.
• Planning guidance also gives examples of how to include reasoning and problem solving in each unit.

Below are links to the White Rose yearly coverage of teaching that are delivered as the maths curriculum at Walkley for each year group. This provides an overview of the units covered throughout the year. From time to time the order of blocks may differ due to the staffing arrangements in each class where PPA staff may deliver a block each week over a term.