Design and Technology at Langley Mill

Intent

We want our children to enjoy and value Design and Technology and know why they are doing things, not just how.  Children will  understand and appreciate the value of Design and Technology in the context of their personal wellbeing and the creative and cultural industries and their many career opportunities. 

Through carefully chosen lessons based on the National Curriculum our children will evaluate, design, make & evaluate. This is a cyclical process as seen above.  A wide variety of knowledge will be taught to do this ranging from researching and developing their design, to understanding how some key events and individuals in design and technology have helped shape the world. 

Six key areas are revisited each year, with Electrical systems and Digital world beginning in KS2. The areas enable all subject leads, specialists or non-specialists, to understand and make it easy for teachers to see prior and future learning for your pupils.

Cooking and nutrition* has a separate section in the D&T National Curriculum, with additional focus on specific principles, skills and techniques in food, including where food comes from, diet and seasonality. Cooking and nutrition units still follow the design process summarised above, for example by tasking the pupils to develop recipes for a specific set of requirements (design criteria) and to suggest methods of packaging the food product including the nutritional information.

Our scheme of work has been designed as a spiral curriculum with the following key principles in mind:

✓ Cyclical: Pupils return to the key strands again and again during their time in primary school.

✓ Increasing depth: Each time the key strand is revisited it is covered with greater complexity.

✓ Prior knowledge: Upon returning to each key strand, prior knowledge is utilised so pupils can build upon previous foundations, rather than starting again.

Our Design & Technology Key Knowledge Progression 

Implementation

We follow the National Curriculum to ensure a broad and balanced Design and Technology curriculum that builds on previous learning and provides both support and challenge for learners.  Where it is realistic to do so links are made with our curriculum themes.  We intend to provide a variety of DT lessons that offer an opportunity for children to demonstrate creativity and imagination. Instead of telling a child what we want them to design, we will offer them a real and relevant problem within a variety of contexts. This way the child will not be limited to their design, allowing scope for creativity. During each unit pupils build on skills developed previously taught.  

We follow the model of Explore- Design, Make- Evaluate- Assess. By completing each stage, we will allow the children to improve their product, following the ‘critique, evaluate and test’ procedure the D&T curriculum speaks of.

Children show their learning in a variety of ways and work may be recorded in curriculum books but will also be seen in photographs and the objects they create.  

Impact

Progress in Design and Technology is demonstrated through regularly reviewing and scrutinising children’s work to ensure that progression of skills is taking place. We assess our pupils formatively, so that we know what our pupils need to secure. We achieve this by:

• Using a 'Sticky Knowledge' quiz to check pupils have remembered key knowledge. 
• Looking at pupils’ work, especially over time as they gain skills and knowledge.
• Observing how they perform in lessons.
• Talking to them about what they know.

Our Design and Technology Lead is Mrs Jackson.