Design Technology
At Northern Education Trust our Design and Technology curriculum aims to be creative, ambitious and practical providing children with the opportunity to problem solve, develop and evaluate their own creative ideas. Leaders have planned a curriculum sequenced from the beginning of early years through to the end of Key Stage 2 enabling pupils to be successful in an ever-evolving technological world.
Through a variety of creative and practical activities, our Design and Technology curriculum enables pupils to have the knowledge, understanding and skills needed to engage in an iterative process of designing and making high-quality prototypes and products for a wide range of users. Pupils will understand the relevance of DT in a range of contexts including the home, school, leisure, culture, enterprise, industry and the wider environment. Through hands-on, practical experiences we aim for children to leave Year 6 with some knowledge and skills of DT which will inspire children to be chefs, engineers, sculptures, carpenters, designers and architects.
Within Design and Technology, substantive knowledge is organised into four interrelated disciplines designing, making, evaluating and technical knowledge to ensure that pupils’ knowledge, skills and understanding are built upon through successive years towards clearly identified year group learning outcomes. Disciplinary knowledge is taught by giving children the opportunity to explore existing products evaluating these before following a design brief to design and make their own improved product.
Careful consideration given to building knowledge (schema theory) and sequencing (making links over time and between themes) guarantees that children have the opportunity to build rich and detailed knowledge.
To help students and teachers with this, we use our ‘Big Ideas’ as ‘golden threads’.
The ‘Big Ideas’ for design technology are:
- mechanics
- structures
- textiles
- food
These ‘golden threads’ allow children to explore a theme across different units of work. The ‘Big Ideas’ allow children to create a schema of design knowledge that flows and progresses with them throughout their time at the academy.
The introduction of key vocabulary is built into each lesson and then included in display materials and additional resources to ensure that children are allowed opportunities to repeat and revise this knowledge. Through revisiting and consolidating skills, our lesson plans and resources help our children build on prior knowledge alongside introducing new skills, knowledge and challenge. We aim to, wherever possible, link work to other disciplines such as mathematics, science, engineering, computing and art.