St Margaret Clitherow Catholic Primary School
We act with love, build our faith and grow as people
DT
Intent
At St Margaret Clitherow we believe that teaching and learning in Design and Technology is important. DT should provide children with a real-life context for learning. Through the DT curriculum, children should be inspired by engineers, designers, chefs and architects to enable them to create a range of structures, mechanisms, textiles, electrical systems and food products with a real-life purpose.
Implementation
All teaching of DT follows the design, make and evaluate cycle. Each stage is rooted in technical knowledge and supported by the Planbee resources to ensure a planned progress of skills. The design process is often rooted in real life, relevant contexts to give meaning to learning. While making, children are given choice and a range of tools to choose from. To evaluate, children evaluate their own products against a design criteria. Each of these steps refer to technical knowledge and vocabulary. DT is taught so that each of the stages are given equal weight. A clear progression across the key stages is planned.
In KS1 this looks like:
Design:
Design rooted in real life, relevant contexts to giving meaning to the learning.
Planned through appropriate formats: drawing, templates, talking and mock-ups.
Make:
Children are given a range of tools for their projects to choose from.
Children use a range of materials and components; textiles, construction equipment and ingredients.
Evaluate:
Evaluation of existing products.
Evaluation their own products against design criteria.
In KS2 this looks like:
Design:
Rooted in real life, relevant contexts to give meaning to the learning.
Researched designs based on functional, appealing products with purpose.
Planned by appropriate methods; annotated sketches, cross-sectional diagrams, prototypes, pattern pieces.
Make:
Children can select from a wider range of tools than KS1.
Children can select a wider range of materials and components; textiles, construction equipment and ingredients.
Evaluate:
Evaluations are in comparison to existing products along with Design criteria.
Children should also understand how key events and individuals have helped shape design and technology globally – products are in context.
Impact
Our DT Curriculum is of good quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression with use of progression grid.
In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
♣ A teacher judgement is made against the achieved planned outcomes and children are
assessed as working at working towards, expected or exceeding.
♣ A pupil book demonstrates progression and includes thoughts, ideas, and processing and evaluations of work. Class discussions and analysis of their work and their peers support the evaluation and feedback process and also develops the children’s’ speaking skills. Design Technology is also monitored by the collection of evidence (photos).