Give teachers clarity: Maths curriculum should build the staircase, not set the high jump

The national review of the F–2 maths curriculum is a welcome chance to put the things that matter most at the centre from the very beginning.

Maths is broad, yes, but it is also hierarchical; some ideas are the load-bearing walls. Teachers need the curriculum to say clearly what those are, and to set out the milestones that show whether children are on track.

Counting will always be part of that picture. But once children can count with confidence, the goal is — wait for it — not counting.

We should be building knowledge of small numbers: their symbols, their relative value and how they can be composed and decomposed. That is number sense. It’s the mental move to treating numbers as objects you can operate on, not just piles of things on the classroom desk to be counted one-by-one.

Early number learning is rightly grounded in concrete experiences — counting, sorting, grouping, patterning. But it’s the early link to abstraction that predicts how children fare later.

Can they think about numbers as having their own value? Do they have quick access to a small bank of known facts for addition and subtraction?

Children who remain reliant on counting concrete objects may look fine in the short term, then struggle when the same ideas are used to build more complex skills. Counting is a vital on-ramp, but it is a slow and effortful strategy to live on.

This is where fluency belongs — and where the current curriculum is, frankly, too coy. It can’t be a vague hope that ‘by the end of Year 2 it will have happened’ … it needs to be named, sequenced, and deliberately built.

The children most at risk stand to gain the most from that clarity: they don’t become anxious because expectations are too high, but because the staircase to those expectations hasn’t been constructed. If we set clear, incremental targets, teachers will know exactly which step to teach next, rather than waiting for fluency to appear on its own as a magical by-product of understanding.

No one doubts that reasoning is the ‘holy grail’ of maths education. What’s needed now is to specify the thresholds that lead students there.

There is also a policy reason to do this now. The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement requires early numeracy screening. If a revised curriculum names the specific number-sense and fluency milestones throughout F-2, students can be supported to build the skills that are measured in an effective screener. Screening and curriculum should reinforce each other, not operate on parallel tracks.

In short, this review is an opportunity to specify — and quantify — what matters most in the early years so teachers can spend their time where it counts. When the curriculum names the destination and the steps, and pairs it with high quality screening checks along the way, teachers have the clarity they need.

Then we won’t be waiting until Year 3 to wonder what went wrong. We’ll be giving every child the footing to move confidently into the rest of mathematics.

Kelly Norris is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Independent Studies.

Photo by Chu Chup Hinh