The Key Stage 2 Maths Strategy Audit: 5 questions every school should ask

If you're a headteacher or maths lead, you'll know the feeling. SATs week comes and goes, the results land, and you're left asking the same question every year: why did some pupils reach the expected level and others didn't?

It's tempting to look for a quick fix. But strong, sustained Key Stage 2 maths results rarely come from a few weeks of extra effort in Year 6. They come from decisions made years earlier, often without anyone realising they'd have such a big impact by the time pupils sit their SATs.

That's why we've put together this short audit — a set of five honest questions to talk through with your maths team, ideally well before Year 6, to help you spot exactly where your curriculum programme is strong and where it might be working against you. The goal is to walk away with two or three things worth looking at more closely over the coming school year.

1. Language continuity: Are you speaking the same maths language across the school?

Here's a question worth asking in your next staff meeting: if you asked a Year 2 pupil and a Year 6 pupil to explain how they solved a problem, would they use the same vocabulary? Would they both recognise a bar model if you drew one on the board?

In many schools, the honest answer is no. Each year group, or even each teacher, develops their own way of talking about maths, their own favourite representations, their own shorthand. That might not seem like a big problem day to day, but it means pupils spend the first few weeks of every September relearning how their new teacher "does" maths, before they can even get started on new content.

Schools that get this right treat mathematical language and representations as part of the curriculum itself, not just a teaching preference. The same stem sentences and the same visual models turn up in Year 1 and Year 6, just applied to increasingly complex problems. Pupils spend less time decoding a new teacher's style and more time actually thinking about maths.

2. Reasoning depth: Is reasoning a daily habit or a SATs-season habit?

SATs reasoning papers are notoriously difficult to "cram" for, because they're designed to test flexible thinking rather than a memorised method. Pupils who have only practised written reasoning in the run-up to SATs are being asked to build a new skill under exam pressure, at exactly the moment they can least afford to.

The alternative is to make reasoning a daily habit from the very start of primary school. That means pupils are regularly asked to explain their thinking out loud to a partner, and just as importantly, to write that explanation down in a maths journal using clear, structured sentences. Over time, this builds the confidence and precision pupils need to tackle an unfamiliar, multi-step word problem without panicking.

3. Inclusive scaffolding: What happens when a pupil struggles?

This is often the question that reveals the most about a school's approach. When a pupil doesn't grasp a concept straight away, what happens next?

In some schools, the answer is the pupil moves onto an easier, separate task, often permanently, through early setting by attainment. It feels like the kind thing to do in the moment, but over time it can mean the pupil never encounters the reasoning and problem-solving the SATs papers actually test.

A more inclusive approach keeps that pupil working on the same rich problem as their peers, just with extra scaffolding, such as concrete resources, a talk partner, or a simplified version of the same bar model. The expectation stays high. The support changes shape instead. This isn't about pretending every pupil is working at the same pace. It's about making sure the pupils who need the most support are still practising the same reasoning skills as everyone else, just with more scaffolding to get there.

4. Greater Depth challenge: Are you accelerating or deepening?

For your higher-attaining pupils, it's easy to assume that "more challenge" means "more advanced content," moving them onto Year 7 topics early, or simply giving them bigger numbers to work with. It's an understandable instinct, but it doesn't reliably build the kind of thinking Greater Depth actually requires.

Reaching Greater Depth means being able to explain why a method works, spot what changes and what stays the same across a set of related problems, and apply an idea in a completely unfamiliar context. None of that comes from working faster through the curriculum. It comes from working deeper within it, through carefully designed variation and genuinely open-ended problems.

5. Teacher subject knowledge: Are your teachers supported or stretched thin?

Most primary teachers are not maths specialists, and that's completely normal. What varies enormously between schools is how much support those teachers get to plan a coherent sequence of questions, spot common misconceptions and choose the right representation for a given concept.

Where teachers are left to build this from scratch every year, the quality of maths teaching can vary wildly between classrooms, even within the same school. Where teachers have a structured lesson framework and ongoing professional development to draw on, they're free to spend their planning time on the things that matter most, like responding to how their own pupils are thinking rather than reinventing the curriculum sequence. Over several years, this consistency tends to matter more for pupil outcomes than any single intervention, simply because every year group benefits from it, not just the one sitting SATs that summer.

Where to go from here

None of these five questions has a single right answer, and it's unlikely any school will score perfectly on all five. That's the point. The audit isn't about finding fault; it's about giving you and your maths team a shared, honest starting point for a conversation that usually only happens informally, if at all.

If you've worked through these questions and found a few gaps, you're in good company, and you're also in a much stronger position than a school that hasn't asked them at all. Small, consistent changes to language, reasoning practice, scaffolding, challenge and teacher support tend to compound over several years, which is exactly the timescale that Key Stage 2 results actually work on.

We've explored these themes in more depth, alongside 2026 SATs results from 23 Maths — No Problem! Accredited Schools, in our new ‘Raising the Ceiling’ report. If this audit has sparked a few ideas for your own school, it's a good next step to read.

Want to talk it through? Get in touch to schedule a maths programme review with our team, or find out more about our Accredited Schools programme.

Learn more

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