Design and Technology at St Denys

Design and Technology (DT) should provide children with a real-life context for learning. At St Denys, we want to allow children to aspire to be more through creating opportunities for them in the wider world. Through the DT curriculum, children should be inspired by engineers, designers, chefs and architects to enable them to create a range of structures, mechanisms, textiles, electrical systems and food products with a real-life purpose.

How Design Technology is taught at St. Denys:

All teaching of DT should follow the design, make and evaluate cycle. Each stage should be rooted in technical knowledge.  The design process should be rooted in real life, relevant contexts to give meaning to learning. While making, children should be given choice and a range of tools to choose freely from. To evaluate, children should be able to evaluate their own products against a design criteria. Each of these steps should be rooted in technical knowledge and vocabulary. DT should be taught to a high standard, where each of the stages should be given equal weight. There should be evidence in each of these stages in Curriculum books, which should also develop to show clear progression through each year group.

In KS1 this looks like:

Design:

• Design should be rooted in real life, relevant contexts to give meaning to the learning.
• Planned through appropriate formats: drawing, templates, talking and mock-ups.

Make:

• Children should be given a range of tools for their projects to choose from.
• Children should use a wide range of materials and components; textiles, construction equipment and ingredients.

Evaluate:

• Evaluate existing products.
• Evaluate their own products against design criteria.