Intent

At St Marks, we aim for our children to see themselves as competent designers. When faced with a design brief, we want our children to have the creativity, practical and technical skills to create quality products, which are fit for a real purpose.

We want our children to be able to evaluate their own and others’ work effectively. Through the use of prototypes, their own reflections and feedback from others, we aim for them to be able to identify how to adapt and improve upon initial design ideas and have the resilience and knowledge to solve problems that arise in a practical manner. We also aim for all our children to understand the importance of nutrition as part of a healthy and active lifestyle and to have all prepared, cooked and tasted a range of healthy dishes over their time here.

We aim for our children to build upon their experiences and prior knowledge, and ensure they retain specific ‘sticky knowledge’ that we wish for them to know in the long term. These are guided by our golden threads of making for purpose, technical vocabulary and cooking and nutrition.

Implementation

Our Design and Technology curriculum allows our children to develop their skills through a wide range of practical, hands-on experiences.

The curriculum also ensures that when our children work through the design process, their work flows uninterrupted from one stage to the next:

Evaluate – Design – Make – Evaluate.

This allows them to become thoroughly familiar with each stage of the design process as well as seeing the process as a whole.

Throughout our Design and Technology units, our children are provided with the opportunities to independently and collaboratively create prototypes of their designs for a wide range of uses, test and evaluate the products that they and others have created and make improvements based upon their reflections.

As part of our curriculum implementation, each year group makes use of our Food Tech equipment to develop their knowledge of nutrition and healthy eating and to learn practical cooking skills.

Impact

Our children gain the key skills and knowledge as set out in the Design and Technology section of the National Curriculum. We want our children to be able to address problem solving with resilience and be able to prior knowledge to make improvements. Also, we wish for them to understand how the material world works, how to be healthy and inspire children to pursue practical work in the future.

The full design process for each unit is recorded in the children’s Art and Design books and final products are celebrated in class and often around the school in corridor displays.