At St Clement's and St John's we want all our children to use their creativity and imagination to design and make products that solve problems, considering their own and others’ needs, wants and values.

The Design and Technology 'Big Ideas'

The knowledge and skills children learn must be co-ordinated and coherent. In order to achieve this in our curriculum, we have identified the key concepts or overarching ideas within each subject. To enable the children to access them, we call these the ‘Big Ideas’.

In DT these are:

• design
• structures and mechanisms
• cooking and nutrition
• textiles.

Intent

At St Clement’s & St John’s Infant School, our vision is for every child to have confidence, compassion, creativity and curiosity in all areas of their learning, including Design and Technology. We believe in every child becoming successful learners and leaders with a passion to live life to the full and change the world for the better.  Consequently, we strive to inspire a curiosity within our pupils about the world in which they live. We want our children to develop a love for Design and Technology.

We aim to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum for Design and Technology; providing a broad and differentiated curriculum whilst ensuring the progressive development of Design and Technological concepts, knowledge and skills. We want our children to be able to build, create and make objects that they are truly proud of. We also want our children to be able to prepare a healthy meal and recognise the importance of food for a long, healthy life. We believe that our teaching should equip pupils with the knowledge, understanding and skills needed to engage in the process of designing and making. They will work in a range of contexts including school, home, playgrounds and the locality (The 2014 National Curriculum in England).

The aim of teaching Design and Technology at our school is:

• To develop pupils’ confidence in their knowledge about designing, making and evaluating and be able to persevere with a design task.
• To develop a compassion and empathy of how Design and Technology can help others in our community and around the world.
• To inspire pupils’ curiosity to discover more about how things are made and the processes that is gone through to create the model. We believe that children should have opportunities to ask questions and make links, allowing them to make sense of the world around them.
• To allow all children to build on their Design and Technology knowledge and skills in creative ways such as through inspiring topics, independent and collaborative learning opportunities and other exciting experiences.

• To develop our key driver of communication by embedding opportunities throughout our Design and Technology curriculum. 

Implementation

At St Clement’s & St John’s Infant School, the Early Years Framework and the National Curriculum is the core of our Design and Technology curriculum.

Our curriculum is designed upon a base of skills and knowledge that we want the children to learn and is taught in a progressive manner throughout the whole school. To ensure high standards of teaching and learning, teachers plan lessons from this progression document and deliver them through topics, which we select to excite and motivate our children.

Impact

We aim for all children to achieve age related expectations in Design and Technology at the end of KS1 and for all children to have a secure understanding of the world around them.

The outcomes of the teaching of Design and Technology across the school can be seen within the children’s topic books.

The assessment of Design and Technology in KS1 is ongoing. The teachers regularly assess through marking and pupil discussions of what the children have learnt. This information then informs the teachers with their planning, lesson activities and differentiation.