Vision:

At Barrowby CE Primary School our aim is to facilitate and provide a wide range of learning opportunities for children in Design and Technology. Children will be taught relevant vocabulary, joining and fixing techniques and skills using various tools. These will progress each year and build on previous learning so we can equip them with the DT skills and knowledge to take into their next steps in education when they leave our school.

Intent:

In order to prepare children to deal with tomorrows rapidly changing world, we will encourage them to become independent, creative problem solvers and thinkers. Children will use their creativity and imagination in Design and Technology, 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.

We aim to, wherever possible, link work to other disciplines such as mathematics, science, computing and art. The children are also given opportunities to reflect upon and evaluate past and present design technology, its uses and its effectiveness and are encouraged to become innovators and risk-takers.

Implementation :

We aim for all children across the school to become confident in Cooking and Nutrition and in Technical Knowledge. Lessons will enable pupils to meet the end of key stage attainment targets in the national curriculum and with those in the national curriculum.

In Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) our Reception children will follow the EYFS statutory framework, which sets out the seven areas of learning, communication and language.

• personal, social and emotional development will be nurtured through communication skills being utilised and developed in the design, making and evaluation process every time a new piece of work is undertaken.
• physical development is enriched and used when products are in the making stage. Fine and gross motor skills will be taught and practised when they are making their product or preparing and cooking a dish.
• Literacy is used for children to communicate their ideas through simple labelling of a design to verbally explaining ideas as they develop.
• Mathematics is used in the making of each product or food dish. This is also through drawing designs and measuring materials or food quantities.
• understanding the world will be further developed by learning about products they are to design and make and how they are used in the world. It will encourage them to begin to think of an audience for their products, which will be important in DT as they move into key stage two.
• expressive arts and design will enable children to begin to develop their imagination and fine motor skills necessary to generate products and enhance their curiosity of what they can build, make and create. They will become familiar with the product they are to make before the design stage. Once they know the product they are to make, they will be able to design and then make it using simple fixing and joining techniques. The final stage of the process will see children evaluating their product against the original design and assessing the cutting (where appropriate for EYFS) and fixing. They will have the opportunity to consider improvements in design and make stages and what they would do differently in the future in the evaluation. This will also nurture children to be self-evaluating and to give them valuable learning experiences to draw on in subsequent years.

At Barrowby School, we deliver Design and Technology through the recommendations from the National Curriculum for Key Stage One and Key Stage Two.

In Key Stage One and Two children learn to:

• Evaluate current products and thinking about how they want to produce their own product
• Design purposeful products for themselves, based on particular criteria
• Generate ideas through talking and drawing
• Select from a range of tools, equipment and materials
• Build structures, thinking about how they can be made stronger and more stable
• Explore mechanisms (levers, sliders, wheels)
• Evaluate their finished product against the design criteria.

For pupils with SEND, their personal targets will inform Design and Technology planning and teaching to identify areas where they may need more support, practice and consolidation. Pupil’s strengths will be focussed upon to ensure all pupils, regardless of their SEN or disability, have the opportunity to develop all the concepts within our curriculum. The approach to these concepts may need to be tailored to SEND children and their needs. Therefore, the learning may have to be done differently with different pupils.

Impact:

From clear steps of learning coupled with vocabulary, all practitioners will be confident in the content they are delivering. As a result, children will have clear enjoyment and confidence in Design and Technology that they will then apply to other areas of the curriculum. Through carefully planned and implemented learning activities the pupils develop the creative, technical and practical expertise needed to perform everyday tasks confidently and to participate successfully in an increasingly technological world. They gain a firm foundation of knowledge and skills to see them equipped to take on further learning after Primary School.

Assessment will take place at the end of each unit.  Teachers will make a formative judgement based upon pupils work in the current unit.  At the end of the year, these judgements will inform teacher assessment in Design and Technology for each pupil. These judgements will be communicated to the class teacher for the following year to ensure pupils continue to progress.