Intent

At Lord Street Primary School, we want our children to think like designers and use their creative and imaginative minds to design and make products in a range of contexts using different materials and equipment. Children will learn and be immersed in a wide range of skills which will enable them to undertake a range of tasks, for example; sewing, weaving, knitting and cooking to name just a few.

Children will use knowledge from other subject areas to learn how to research and evaluate a range of different designers (both local and nationally) and products so that they can draw inspiration from them and implement some of their work into their own designs.

We have based the core of our Design Technology curriculum on the National Curriculum (2014), however we have implemented key strategies to make it relevant to our children at Lord Street Primary School. We have built this curriculum around our school values, ‘Ambition, Respect and Collaboration’ whilst also focussing on building a sense of cultural capital in the children. This will allow them full access to both the curriculum as they grow older and the rich heritage of our country and the rest of the world. We aim to build on the Design Technology curriculum yearly to show clear steps for progression in skills and knowledge, but also to aid our children in retrieval practice as we recap and link previous learning.

Implementation

Teachers will create a positive attitude to Design Technology within their classrooms and reinforce an expectation that all pupils are capable of achieving high standards. Our children should be able to organise their knowledge, skills and understanding around the following learning hooks:

• Research and explore specific skills.
• Design and create products.
• Implement and evaluate their designs and final products.

Impact

Through the teaching of design skills, both teachers and children assess their learning continuously throughout the lesson/topic. At the end of the unit, children will complete a piece of work which they will assess and evaluate. This will be done by answering key questions stated in the curriculum plan taken from the National Curriculum aims. Children and teachers will assess based on their final product being fit for purpose. Our assessment systems enable teachers to make informed judgements about the depth of their learning and the progress they have made over time. Effective feedback gives children guidance about how they might improve the quality of their products. The subject leader will carry out book looks and interviews with the children to see how the design technology curriculum is being followed and what impact this is having on the children’s learning.