Intent

At St Mary’s, our vision for Design and Technology is to empower students to become more creative, innovative and problem-solving individuals, who can design, make, evaluate and apply products that meet the present and future world. Our core principles are a curriculum that is relevant to the local area, environmentally sustainable, as well as having an emphasis on health and wellbeing.

Our intention is that teacher instruction inspires pupils to acquire knowledge as designers and technologists, enabling them to skilfully apply their understanding.

Implementation

The Design and Technology curriculum is organised into blocks within each Key Stage. Each block covers a particular set of disciplines.

• Food and nutrition
• Mechanisms
• Structures
• Textiles
• Understanding materials (KS1)
• Electrical Systems (KS2- taught alongside the Science Electricity block)

Vertical progression in each discipline has been deliberately woven into the curriculum so that pupils revisit key concepts throughout their primary journey at increasing degrees of challenge and complexity.

The curriculum outlines key aspects of development in the Working as a Designer section (design, make, apply and evaluate). Each module will focus on promoting different aspects of these competencies. This will support teachers in understanding pupils' progress as designers more broadly, as well as how successfully they are acquiring the taught knowledge and skills.

Activities are designed to develop pupils' oracy and vocabulary skills to enable them to use technological language when talking about their work and the work of others.

Impact

Pupils will be excited to explore new things. They will be creative thinkers who have the knowledge and skills to be able to design, make, investigate and explore why things work. Pupils will have the vocabulary to talk about how and why things work and the confidence to explore possible solutions to Design and Technology questions and problems.