Design and Technology

Our vision at Brierley is to engage and inspire children to become resourceful and innovative individuals who use creativity, imagination and interaction skills to participate confidently, safely and successfully in design technology projects. Our children show endurance and resilience and are able to self-evaluate. In our school children feel a sense of achievement and are proud to share their DT work.

Our approach to Design and Technology curriculum is through creating lessons that engage, challenge and excite pupils, which is underpinned by KAPOW scheme of work. This structures teaching and learning through designing, making and evaluating. 

The key concepts, principles and themes have been developed from the National Curriculum into a scheme of progressive knowledge and skills, where pupils are encouraged to grow, develop and enhance their skills in Design and Technology in 21st century Britain.

The curriculum is designed to meet the needs of all our pupils. It is rich, varied and creative, giving children the handle on their own designs and ideas. It is imaginative and ambitious whilst being easily adapted for pupils with additional needs. It is knowledge and skills based and allows for creative lessons building on to the next, enabling us to move away from discrete lessons and into a more meaningful and purposeful sequence of learning. 

Our Design Technology curriculum has active engagement through multi-sensory learning, encourages the demonstrating understanding of learning in a variety of ways and the consolidating of knowledge. Each lesson builds progressively on taught skills, as does each year group. All teaching of DT should follow the design, make and evaluate sequence.  

A design, make and evaluate approach is used within lessons and units of work to ensure children develop a deep understanding of specific skills and are then able to apply these in a range of situations. To evaluate, children are able to evaluate their own products against a design criteria. DT is taught to a high standard, where each of the stages are given equal weight. There is evidence of each of these stages in pupils DT folders, which also show clear progression across the key stages.

Formative assessment is on going throughout each lesson and each unit of work. It supports teachers with their planning and ensures they make flexible adaptions to support all pupils’ needs. Throughout this, tasks are then matched to ability ensuring they are ambitious and set challenge for all. These are differentiated through level of support and key questioning.

Insight Tracker is used as summative assessment. The knowledge and skills learning goals are highlighted to identify any gaps in learning that can then be addressed and inform teachers in the following year groups. 

The knowledge and skills pupils acquire through the teaching of DT at Brierley school equips them for future learning. We endeavor to enthuse pupils within DT, which as a result may support may empower them to explore a range of opportunities available to them in the wider world.

Please clink on the images below to see our DT ambassadors.

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