Intent

As a school we believe that Design Technology is important in everyday life. It is our intention to provide children with a DT education that is relevant in our rapidly changing world.  We want to encourage our children to develop creative, technical and imaginative thinking and to develop confidence to participate successfully in an increasingly technological world. We aim to foster enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose in designing and making things and to understand how key events and individuals in design and technology have helped shape the world.

Implementation

We have a clear and comprehensive scheme of work in line with the National Curriculum. Through the support of the Design and Technology Association (DATA) scheme, Projects on a Page, children will experience an array of different progressive and linkable skills and techniques over the course of a child’s time here.

This ensures that children are constantly building upon previous learning and are able to expand their knowledge and understanding of problem solving, designing and constructing different products.

Children will complete 3 projects a year, spending enough time on each project to be fully immersed in the design-make-evaluate process.

For each project, children follow the design-make and evaluate sequence, allowing children time to reflect upon their design and products and think of ways that they could be improved or adapted.

Teachers support and model increasingly progressive evaluative skills to enable children to create products of a high-quality throughout school.

Children are given a design brief to put the need for the product in context. Where possible, teachers ensure that the brief is linked to another area of their learning through topic work or has relevance to the children to inspire their imagination and eagerness to create and problem solve.

Safety is explained and modelled at the start of and throughout each product including food hygiene instructions.

Cross-curricular links are made whenever opportunities arise, particularly in Science, Maths, Computing and Art.

Children work both collaboratively and independently when solving problems during which we encourage them to persevere and develop resilience.

Impact

Children display a clear enjoyment and confidence in design and technology because it is promoted as being an exciting and enjoyable subject in which they can investigate and ask questions; they know that it is OK to be ‘wrong’ and that this can strengthen their learning because the journey to finding an answer is most important

Children are confident to ‘have a go’ and choose the equipment they need to help them to learn along with the strategies they think are best suited to each problem.

Engaged children who are challenged, know their strengths and what they need to improve.

Most children reach end of year expectations and that all children make progress.

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

Reflection on standards achieved against the planned outcomes; pupil discussions about their learning, which includes discussion of their thoughts, ideas, processing and evaluations of work. Independent pupil interviews.

Children will ultimately know more, remember more and understand more about Design Technology, demonstrating this knowledge when using tools or skills.