Design & Technology

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D&T

at St Luke's CE Primary School

We want our pupils to think and intervene creatively to solve problems both as individuals and collaboratively. At St Luke’s, we encourage children to use their creativity and imagination, to design and make purposeful products that solve real and relevant problems within a variety of contexts, considering their own and others’ needs, wants and values. We aim to, wherever possible, link work to other disciplines such as Mathematics, Science, Engineering, Computing and Art. Our knowledge- and skills-based curriculum encourages them to become innovators and risk-takers, teaching them to embrace both success and failure as part a valid process, as well as critically evaluating their end products and reflecting on the process of designing and constructing.

How do we teach Design and Technology?

We want our pupils to be excited by the possibilities of Design Technology and want them to be clear about what they are expected to learn through the use of knowledge organisers which function as a tool to help them. We make use of teacher, peer and self-assessment so that classes can review the process and identify ways to improve the product.

D.T. knowledge and skills go hand-in-hand and are taught through a process that follows the same formula throughout the school so that children can understand the core design process of ‘design- make- evaluate’, then the more involved process of ‘brief- design- prototype- manufacture- test- evaluate’ is made more explicit to them as they get older and move up through Key Stage 2.

Teaching follows an enquiry model and encourages questioning and reflection. Teachers are clear about what they need to teach through the use of a well-sequenced curriculum that contains all the knowledge and resources they will need to use, but they are also informed about how each unit relates to it’s prior- and future- learning. This ensures that children make the progress in knowledge and skills that we intend. Teachers and children are also aided by our DT curriculum structure that has recurring concepts woven through it that build on prior learning- this is demonstrated in our Design Technology overview which shows how these threads - cooking and nutrition, textiles, mechanisms, programming and structures - weave their way through the curriculum and ensure breadth and depth. Equal importance has been placed on each thread, except for ‘cooking and nutrition’. Classes will complete a unit on this in every year group. This is because obesity rates in Salford are much higher than nationally and life expectancy rates much lower than nationally. We hope that, by providing dietary guidance and practical skills through our DT units (alongside our Science units), we can mitigate this to some degree for our pupils.

 

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