Design and Technology (DT)

Design & Technology 

Intent
Here at St John’s we aim to provide a design and technology curriculum that is inclusive and engaging for every child. As a school, we recognise the importance of enabling the future generation to understand the impact of design and technology in our rapid and ever changing world. We want to help our children grow and become resourceful, innovative and enterprising, where they build confidence to take risks and become problem solvers. All the children in our school are exposed to a wide range of media, including textiles, woodwork and food.

Each child will be provided with opportunities to:

• Be creative and use their imagination
• Develop their technical vocabulary through discussion
• Allowing them to talk about how things work
• Elaborate on their understanding by making prototypes and products for a variety of users.
• Select appropriate tools and resources, ensuring safety guidelines are followed.
• Evaluate their products and allow for constructive criticism.
• Learn the importance of nutrition and how to make balanced healthy food dishes.
• Share their satisfaction and delight with their finished products.

Implementation
To ensure our children are given the very best teaching and learning experience at St John’s, we have implemented a curriculum that is progressive across the whole school. The children are taught in a 2 week block, every other term, as we believe this gives the children the chance to immerse themselves fully into a project and continue a flow of learning, helping them to embed knowledge, skills and vocabulary.

We also believe in enhancing the curriculum by:

• Delivering projects that have a clear structure. All of our children will undertake a textile topic, a food/drink topic and a construction topic.
• Delivering projects that follow a clear design process of design, make and evaluate.
• Ensuring a range of skills are taught and children are aware of health and safety regulations related to the tasks undertaken.
• Underpinning cross-curricular links and allowing children to learn life skills and apply these skills in a ‘hands on’ way.
• Making sure children explore the design process, evaluating their work and ensuring it is of the highest quality. All projects are assessed against the curriculum objectives as well as children self-evaluating their work and giving constructive criticism to their peers.
• Implementing independent and collaborative learning. Independent learning helps children to solve problems and think as an individual therefore taking ownership and leading their own learning. Collaborative learning enables the children work as part of a team through supporting and helping one another towards reaching an end goal.

Impact
We are a school that strives to prepare children for our rapidly changing world and through the study of design and technology children are able to combine their practical skills with the understanding of social and environmental issues.

We measure impact through:

• Assessing children’s understanding prior to teaching the unit.
• Observations and photos of practical learning.
• Summative assessment of pupil discussions about their learning.
• Assessing outcomes that match the skills and knowledge for appropriate age groups.
• Pupil voice – talking to pupils about their learning.