Subject Co-ordinator: Mrs McGrory

Intent

In our school, we are designers and love to explore new technology! Through our DT curriculum, we aim to ensure all children are inspired by this rigorous, practical subject. We celebrate creativity and ingenuity. We structure learning opportunities so children can design and produce products that solve real and relevant problems, with a constant focus on purpose and target market. Our DT is heavily linked with the rest of our curriculum which provides a theme for learning and develops our children’s substantive and disciplinary knowledge.

Curriculum model

Approach

Our DT curriculum is structured to use a mastery approach to learning. Through carefully constructed sequences and links across the whole curriculum, children build on prior learning progressively. They learn through immersion and application, which supports them to explicitly link ideas. Children are taken carefully through the five strands of a DT project – design brief, analysis, design, build and evaluate.  We use real world business practices to support and extend this process. For example, using marketing and sales ideas to sell sushi or ice cream.

We extend our DT learning out into the community. We are supported by experienced secondary school teachers, who come in to take lessons. The University of the Creative Arts send tutors to us for sessions, whilst our Year 6 students spend a day at the University getting taught DT by experts in their fields. We have an Art and DT Showcase in the summer term, where we proudly show off our children’s work.

Challenge/support

Using Blooms driver vocabulary, children are enabled to dig deeper with their learning. Whilst given as much autonomy as possible, children go from remembering facts, to applying new knowledge and then to generating questions. This then builds more challenging learning opportunities where they have to reason, justify, evaluate and create. This structured approach means all our young designers are included and can access the learning.