Year 9 · Maths
Students apply Mathematics to the planning of a fictional school wellbeing festival, using percentages, budgets, capacity, scale, area, ratios and changing constraints. The strand shows how Maths can help plan systems around wellbeing without reducing people or individual experiences to numbers. All planning data is fictional and the project does not require personal disclosure or diagnosis.
Strand at a glance
The lesson sequence below comes from the complete strand guide.
Detailed strand guidance
Driving Question: How can Mathematics help us design support for different needs?
Students begin by exploring how Mathematics can be used to plan systems around wellbeing. The lesson establishes an important boundary: mental health cannot be reduced to a number, but Maths can help people plan money, space, capacity, staffing and access carefully.
Students learn and practise:
Students then receive the Wellbeing Festival design brief. The fictional starting context uses a £10,000 budget, 600 attendees, a 30 m × 20 m site, 12 staff and three event rotations. Students prepare to apply the skills from the lesson to one practical design.
Students produce: Initial Planning Calculations + Design Preparation
Driving Question: How can different mathematical constraints be combined into one workable design?
Students work in pairs to begin building the Wellbeing Festival. They choose activities from the projected activity menu and must track cost, capacity, area and staffing at the same time.
Students create a scaled plan using 1 cm = 2 m. The full 30 m × 20 m festival site therefore becomes 15 cm × 10 cm on the A3 design. Their plan must include a clear site map, budget tracker, capacity tracker, space calculations and visible mathematical working.
The design is tested against the starting constraints:
Students produce: Scaled A3 Wellbeing Festival Plan with Budget, Capacity and Space Trackers
Driving Question: How should a design change when the information and constraints change?
This lesson becomes the Festival Chaos stage. Students do not start again; instead, they use new mathematical information to adapt the design they already created.
The projected updates change the original model:
Students must recalculate, revise and annotate their design rather than simply make cosmetic changes. They record at least two adaptations and show the mathematical evidence that caused each change.
Students produce: Revised Festival Plan + Adaptation Log
Driving Question: How can we prove that a final design works mathematically?
This is the final build off and validation lesson. Students bring together the calculations and adaptations from the previous periods and test the final design against the complete set of constraints.
The final design must show:
Students then receive a final emergency challenge: 200 additional students are arriving and the pair receives £1,000 emergency funding. They must find an efficient way to increase capacity without redrawing the whole festival, showing the extra cost, extra capacity and reasoning behind the decision.
Students peer check whether the final design can be understood quickly and complete a short reflection on the most important calculation, one hidden need they responded to, and how Maths improved the design.
Students produce: Final Wellbeing Festival Design + Emergency Challenge Response + Reflection
Conceptual journey
The Strand in One Sentence: Students move from learning the mathematical tools needed for planning, to building a constrained design, adapting it when new information appears, and finally validating a workable solution using clear mathematical evidence.
Learn -> Calculate -> Design -> Adapt -> Test -> Finalise
The Maths Strand therefore moves from learning isolated mathematical skills to applying them together in a practical model, then changing and validating that model when the situation becomes more demanding.
Assessment evidence and skills
Each period produces evidence of learning, giving students a clear record of how their design develops:
Across the strand, students practise applying percentages, budgets, scale, area, capacity and ratios while working within multiple constraints and adapting when the mathematical situation changes.
Across the strand, students practise:
| Category | Points |
|---|---|
| Mathematical Accuracy | 25 |
| Budget Management | 15 |
| Scale, Area & Layout | 15 |
| Capacity & Percentages | 15 |
| Response to Surprise Changes | 15 |
| Quality of Final Festival Design | 10 |
| Creativity | 5 |
| TOTAL | 100 |
Pair score -> Tutor group average -> Faculty average.
Curriculum source: Y9 Strand Guide.docx
