At Saint Joseph’s, the Borough, our Design and Technology curriculum aims to inspire and instil creativity, curiosity and critical thinking skills in all learners. We want our pupils to develop the creative, technical and practical expertise. We intend to provide a platform for pupils to develop this expertise needed in order to perform design tasks confidently and to participate successfully in an increasingly technological world. Design and Technology equips our children with a range of skills, such as designing, selecting and manipulating a wide variety of tools, critiquing and evaluating. These are key skills, important for use in their future lives across a range of areas.
During their time at Saint Joseph’s, the Borough, children are exposed to a wealth of practical and thought-provoking Design and Technology experiences from the National Curriculum using the three-part, design, make and evaluate model. We frequently combine the sessions into whole mornings, afternoons, or indeed whole days for older children. We enrich our children’s lives by promoting and valuing creativity from all by providing a range of engaging lessons, workshops and collaborative opportunities to best develop the skills, knowledge and understanding needed to be successful learners. Children are exposed to a range of cross-curricular activities that promote and further strengthen these skills, knowledge and understanding. This includes designing, creating and evaluating products and devices for specific purposes. These often draw strongly on the skills learned in Mathematics, Computing, Writing, Science, History, Geography or Art. In Key Stage 1, there is a focus on developing children’s practical tool usage and manipulation whilst also developing an understanding of the need for design and making in a range of relevant contexts. As the children progress into Key Stage 2, they cultivate their designing and making skills whilst developing their understanding of the relevance of researching and evaluating current products to inform their designs. They then progress onto generating templates and mock-ups for designs. Food technology also plays a large role throughout school, allowing the children to understand and apply the principles of nutrition, the components of a healthy and varied diet and how a variety of ingredients are grown, reared, caught and processed.
The large majority of our pupils will be working at least at age-related expectations for their year group at the end of each school year in Design and Technology and a significant proportion will be working beyond these expectations. By ensuring children develop a broad and balanced knowledge base, deep understanding and varied skills set, our pupils will exhibit an ongoing passion for Design and Technology. They will hopefully become risk takers, who are enterprising, resourceful and innovative life-long learners.
