Intent - What do we intend children to learn through Design and Technology?

In Design and technology, we expect all children to learn new technical skills that build upon prior knowledge and experiences, enabling them to know more and remember more. The Design and technology curriculum is carefully sequenced so that there is a clear progression of skills from Reception to Year 6, matching the expectations of the National Curriculum. Our Design and technology curriculum aims to prepare children to live in an increasingly technological world by providing them with the creative, technical and practical expertise to perform everyday tasks confidently. We expect children to have the knowledge, understanding and skills to be able to design and make high-quality products for a wide range of users and purposes, and be able to critique and evaluate the work of themselves and others. Alongside Science, children will be immersed in the Design and technology curriculum as part of our STEM based summer term topic. Within this topic children will explore our RPS values, connecting our themes of Respect, Pride and Success to Design and technology. 

How do we teach Design and Technology at Repton Primary School?

Teachers from EYFS to Year 6 use the Progression of Skills document to help inform their planning in Design Technology (DT). Lessons are sequenced carefully by teachers to ensure progression and guarantee the coverage of the knowledge and skills children are expected to acquire within their year group.

All teaching of DT should follow the ‘Design, Make, Evaluate’ cycle. While each stage may look different across each Key Stages (E.g., EYFS may talk about their design ideas, whereas Year 6 pupils may produce annotated sketches and cross-sectional diagrams to share their ideas), all year groups should follow this process. During the design process, pupils should be given a design brief which outlines the aims of the DT project. All design briefs should follow the pattern of making something, for someone for a given purpose, and should be based on real life, relevant contexts to give meaning to pupils’ learning. Throughout the designing stage, pupils should be given opportunities to conduct research, experiment with designs and communicate/share their ideas with others. During the making process, pupils should be allowed to choose their resources freely from a wide range of tools, materials and components. When evaluating, pupils should evaluate their own and others’ products against a design criteria. They should also evaluate their ideas and the design and making process, and suggest improvements for next time.

As part of the DT curriculum in school, pupils will learn about key inventors, designers, chefs and engineers.

Evidence of teaching and learning in DT can be found in Topic books, Science books and on displays in the classroom.

At Repton Primary School, the Design Technology curriculum is heavily focused on during the summer term as it is taught alongside our Science curriculum, offering pupils STEM based learning opportunities. We continually strive to give pupils the most enriching learning opportunities and therefore hope to work with local STEM based companies as often as possible to enhance the curriculum and provide our children with practical, real life STEM experiences.