St Joseph's Catholic Primary School

Design and technology is an inspiring, rigorous and practical subject. Using creativity and imagination, pupils design and make products that solve real and relevant problems within a variety of contexts, considering their own and others’ needs, wants and values. This results in building new skills and knowledge based upon what has been taught before, allowing all pupils to work towards clearly defined end points. The school has its own Scheme of Work which is ambitious and sequential. The three phases of designing, making and evaluating are clear.

We use a range of pedagogical practices in the teaching of design and technology to ensure that we are successful with our Intent. This can range from small group tasks, individual tasks, whole class tasks. We focus a lot on teacher modelling, expert questioning, giving children memorable experiences and over-learning to ensure that key knowledge is transferred to children’s long-term memory.

In the Early Years Foundation Stage, design and technology forms part of the learning children acquire under the ‘Knowledge and Understanding of the World' branch of the Foundation Stage curriculum.  The children learn through first-hand experiences and are encouraged to explore, observe, solve problems, think critically, make decisions and to talk about why they have made their decisions.

The Scheme of Work provides has clear learning objectives to embed learning in the long-term memory by ensuring prior learning is linked to current learning and encompassing memorable learning experiences.

Our design and technology curriculum covers the aims and skills outlined in the National Curriculum through broad, challenging and inspiring topics. A topic-based approach is used to deliver the content within a meaningful context and wherever possible cross-curricular links are exploited particularly links with history, British Values, School Values, computing, English and Maths.

Prior knowledge and skills skills are revised before teaching the children new concepts, to progress the children’s knowledge, understanding and to engage the children in the process of designing and making. This approach builds on pupils’ previous learning and ensures an appropriate level of understanding which allows the children to approach new concepts with confidence.

See HERE for the Curriculum Overview.