Cognition; Maths and Programming

Our school believes that Maths and Numeracy are very closely related to the development of thinking skills and understanding the organisation of the world. We take a developmentally based approach to developing the deeper, underlying understanding so that Maths and Numeracy is based on understanding that can be applied in pupils' lives rather than memory of isolated rote processes. We also understand that pupils are entitled to learn about programming to a challenging extent appropriate to their level of understanding. Our pupils all have severe, profound or complex learning difficulties and therefore our curriculum is designed to optimise the access to programming at that appropriate level of teaching. We believe that the underlying skills and understanding of programming is very closely related to that of Maths and Numeracy. We therefore teach programming in different accessible contexts focusing on the underlying skills of following and creating instructions including "if this.... then this" operations (basic algorithms), 'debugging' and working out where instructions go wrong and applying their understanding of logic (developmentally referred to as cognition) to situations and problem solving. 

We teach Maths, Cognition and Programming to meet our core statements of intent: 

  • Teach pupils to learn as much about the world as possible

 Each theme of our maths curriculum is designed to teach pupils to become more aware of the mathematics of everyday life and thereby to learn about the world in a more precise and focused way. 

  • Teach pupils the skills to optimise their effectiveness in the world

 Numeracy and other thinking/cognitive skills and understanding are vital to optimising understanding and opportunities in wider life, both in the present and as pupils grow towards adulthood. 

  • Teach pupils to grow into confident, caring and considerate citizens

The more pupils understand the world around them the more confident they will grow and this will greatly add to their capacity to give to others and the wider community. Maths, Cognition and Programming can all support this understanding of categorisation, quantity, the relation of parts to the whole, and the relationships between things in time and space - including sequencing. 

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