Design and Technology

Intent

At Fairways we aim to provide a curriculum which is stimulating and challenging, where a life-long passion for learning is nurtured.  We believe in creating well rounded individuals and ensuring every child has the opportunity to achieve their full potential through a varied curriculum. 

We believe Design and Technology should be valued as part of the whole school curriculum.  Children are given the opportunity to plan, design, produce and evaluate.  Skills are taught in a progressive way, encouraging more independence and broadening the variety of tools, materials and techniques used to design and make products.  We aim to encourage children to use their imagination and creativity to solve problems whilst designing and making. 

We hope to inspire the children to transfer these skills to be able to use them outside of school. 

Design and Technology lends itself well to other subjects such as Maths, Science and Art.  Children can transfer skills such as measuring, shape, aesthetics, planning and evaluating.    

‘Design and technology is an inspiring, rigorous and practical subject. Using creativity and imagination, pupils design and make products that solve real and relevant problems within a variety of contexts, considering their own and others’ needs, wants and values.’ (National Curriculum).

Implementation

We teach Design and Technology to ensure that skills and knowledge are built on year by year and sequenced appropriately to maximise learning for all children, extending not only skills but by also broadening their vocabulary as well. 

Across the year dedicated D/T days are planned in for children to have the time to broaden their knowledge about a specific topic or theme, plan from a given brief, produce the intended product choosing from a range of tools and materials and then moving on to finally evaluating their own and other learners final completed products.  Cross-curricular opportunities are given via the skills and knowledge learnt in D/T for the children to use in other subjects and themes across their school career from EYFS to Year 6. 

DT Subject Leads have created a long term plan, outlining the curriculum coverage and progression in skills across each year group.   These plans are used as a guide for teachers to then personalise to a chosen theme and differentiate in short term weekly plans to challenge all learners.   

Impact

DT Subject Leads will have monitoring time across the year, part of which will be spent having discussions with the children.  We want children to be self-critical learners, who are confident to self-evaluate completed tasks and projects.  They will be able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of their work and be able to think of solutions to improve their existing design or produced on Target Tracker to make sure that children are progressing the skills outlined for their age range.  product.  We want the children to be able to talk about the tools, techniques and processes they have used.  Photographic records of DT Day projects will be in the child's DT book to provide evidence of the finished products that have been made and the processes and skills that the children are employing to produce them.   Some DT subject leadership time will be spent observing and supporting the children during their DT Days. DT Subject Leaders will also monitor progress