Design Technology at St Benedict’s
Intent
Our St Benedict’s curriculum is designed with the intent to maximise the potential of all of our pupils;
intellectually, socially, morally, emotionally and culturally. We take every opportunity to encourage a love for learning within all of our pupils, based around a resilience for learning and achieving greatness. Most importantly we allow our children to learn in a safe and stimulating environment, where their views are valued.
At St Benedict’s we encourage children to use their creativity and imagination, to design and make products that solve real and relevant problems within a variety of contexts, considering their own and others’ needs, wants and values. Design and Technology is an inspiring, rigorous and practical subject. It can be found in many of the objects children use each day and is a part of children’s immediate experiences. Design and Technology encourages children to learn to think and intervene creatively to solve problems both as individuals and as members of a team. At St Benedict’s the Design and Technology curriculum combines skills, knowledge, concepts and values to enable children to tackle real problems. It can improve analysis, problem solving, practical capability and evaluation skills. We aim to, wherever possible, link work to other disciplines such as mathematics, science, engineering, computing and art. The children are encouraged to become innovators and risk-takers.
Implementation
Design Technology is taught through our CUSP curriculum.
Our Design Technology curriculum:
- Enables our children to undertake projects with a design or engineering focus, a textile focus and a food/nutrition topic.
- Delivers a design process where each project has a clear design specification, enables thorough research of current products, has opportunities to design and or innovate products for a target audience, develops making skills and encourages careful evaluation.
- Teaches a range of skills, ensuring that children are aware of health and safety issues related to the tasks undertaken.
- Includes clear and appropriate cross curricular links to underpin learning in multi areas across the curriculum giving the children opportunities to learn life skills and apply skills to ‘hands on’ situations in a purposeful context.
- Allows our children to record their design technology learning journey by presenting their work appropriately for their age. This will include design booklets that will show some or all of the following: design brief, design specification, research, mood boards, research into current
products, data gathered from their target audience, annotated designs, exploding diagrams and evaluation, including their design changes and target audience feedback. - Allows independent learning as this enables the children to problem solve and have ownership over their curriculum and lead their own learning in Design Technology.
- Allows for collaborative learning as this enables the children to work as part of a team learning to support and help one another towards a challenging, yet rewarding goal.
Impact
Outcomes evidence a broad and balanced Design Technology curriculum and demonstrate the children’s acquisition of identified key knowledge. Children reflect on their learning at the end of each topic and are actively encouraged to identify their own target areas, as well as reviewing their own learning styles, with support from their teachers (reflection sheets).
Teachers complete subject tracking sheets to identify pupils’ progress across the school and ensure smooth transitions throughout the school.
There is always an assessment focus at the end of each topic.
The Design Technology lead and the Head teacher take responsibility for the monitoring of the Design Technology curriculum and the standards achieved by the children.
This monitoring takes the form of:
- Lesson observations and feedback;
- Learning walks and pupil voice conversations;
- Planning scrutiny followed by support where necessary;
- Book scrutinies on a frequent basis;
- Data analysis.
