Intent

At Wanstead Church School, our Design and Technology curriculum is designed to inspire children to become designers, engineers and chefs and to shine their light in the world.

We develop Wisdom, Compassion and Strength in our DT curriculum:

Wisdom: Our DT curriculum empowers children to use their creativity, technical knowledge and practical understanding, to ask questions and to seek answers to understand processes and mechanisms. These skills are used to design and make high quality products for a range of users. Our DT curriculum equips children with a broad knowledge and skills to become creative individuals, who have a passion and enthusiasm for solving real and relevant problems in the community.

Compassion: Our DT curriculum encourages children to be open-minded, supportive and considerate of peers’ ideas during cooperative learning, making every child feel valued throughout the process. Our children learn to compassionately critique and evaluate their own and others’ work, considering their own and others’ needs, wants and values.

Strength: Our DT curriculum instils resilience and a sense of adventure in taking risks in the designing and making of products so that our children are prepared to participate successfully in an increasingly technological world. The products the children create have a positive impact on the community at Wanstead Church School, considering the culture, wealth and well-being of the school and the wider world.

Implementation

To ensure high standards of teaching and learning in Design and Technology, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Design and Technology is taught based on the Projects on a Page scheme. The areas focused on in Design and Technology are: mechanisms, electrical systems, textiles, food technology and mechanical structures.

The Design and Technology curriculum at Wanstead Church School is based upon the 2014 Primary National Curriculum in England, which provides a broad framework and outlines the knowledge and skills taught in each Key Stage. The progression document ensures the curriculum is covered and the skills/knowledge taught is progressive from year group to year group and the children experience a variety of Design and Technology projects, in line with the six focus areas above. This enables the children to gain a variety of ‘real-life’ experiences to help develop and continue their interests in the wider world.

A variety of teaching approaches are used based on the teacher’s judgement. Design and Technology are planned through: exploration and investigation of existing products to create their own design success criteria, developing knowledge and technical skills using prototypes and making their own products, and evaluating it against the success criteria. The children explain why and how they made the products and are evidenced through photographs of the design process and their finished pieces.  This process is used in both KS1 and KS2 with varied questioning to support skill and knowledge progression.

Design and Technology lessons are taught termly to create a product focused on the purpose and the user. The lessons are either grouped together in afternoon sessions over 1-2 weeks to support the flow of creativity and designing of their product or take place in weekly one-hour lessons over the half term.

Impact

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

• Assessing children’s understanding of topic linked vocabulary before and after the unit is taught.
• Formative assessment of the child discussions about their learning.
• Images of the children’s practical learning and final products.
• Interviewing the children about their learning.