Design Technology
Design Technology at Northbrook is led by Mrs Goldfarb.
Our Curriculum Drivers
HEART Values – Design Technology at Northbrook is a chance to express our individuality and feel happy in ourselves. Through their Design Technology lessons, children are engaged, inspired and challenged, encouraged to experiment, invent and be aspirational with their thinking. Throughout their time at Northbrook, children will be encouraged to think critically about their own work as well as the work of others, demonstrating the importance of empathy and teamwork. We learn to respect the opinions and views of others, as well as respect for a range of different cultures.
Literacy and Language – We use our “introduction to the product” sessions to learn to why and how products are designed and built and understand the core vocabulary and sentences that will be needed to help us design and evaluate our products.
Community and Cultural Diversity- Through our Design Technology curriculum, we explore a range of technologies and designers from different cultures, genders and ethnicities.
Global Citizenship – Many areas of our Design Technology curriculum encourage us to consider our environment and how we can create sustainability in our products in our learning. This helps us to respect the earth and the variety of people living in it and we learn to use it to communicate about causes we care about.
Our Aim
At Northbrook, we believe that an understanding of the development and design of technology, engineering of new products and importance of nutrition are essential to helping children understand how the world around us keeps growing, developing and changing and their part in the process. We are dedicated to giving our children access to a wide range of design streams and designers from a diverse range of backgrounds to help inspire them to think critically and appreciate the subject at its fullest. Through a sequence of well-planned Design Technology lessons, we want to prepare our children to enter later life with a love of creativity, alongside a carefully structured set of engineering and building skills. We feel children should have access to a wide range of experiences that help them to believe that everyone is creative and enjoy art in all of its forms.
Our curriculum is designed to blend together the direct teaching of DT Skills as well as encouraging analytical and creative thinking with a range of materials and products that link to the wider links to learning around curriculum areas e.g. Earthquakes, The stone age, Egyptians, our Local Environment and the study of particular artists. We explore the roles of artists, craftspeople and designers through different time periods and aim to achieve our own personal best in every piece of artwork we create.
In ensuring high standards of teaching and learning in Design Technology, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Art teaching focusses on the knowledge and skills stated in the National Curriculum.
The national curriculum for design technology aims to ensure that all pupils:
- develop the creative, technical and practical expertise needed to perform everyday tasks confidently and to participate successfully in an increasingly technological world.
- build and apply a repertoire of knowledge, understanding and skills in order to design and make high-quality prototypes and products for a wide range of users.
- critique, evaluate and test their ideas and products and the work of others.
- understand and apply the principles of nutrition and learn how to cook.
National Curriculum - Design Technology
Our Learning
Our curriculum aims to provide a high-quality experiences for all children which will help them to develop a visual and technical awareness of how the world around them is built and created. Through a wide range of Design and Technology focusses across their learning journey, our children build and apply a repertoire of knowledge, understanding and skills in order to design and make quality products for a wide range of users. Throughout each unit, children are immersed in the full design process including: testing, re-evaluating, and amending a design until a desirable finished product is produced. They then go on to critique, evaluate and test their ideas and products along with the work of others. This process supports learning for life as it provides children with an opportunity to design and create products for a specific purpose, just as would be expected in design-based careers. Understanding and applying the principles of nutrition, food preparation and food sources is also a key aspect of this subject.
Through our Design Technology units, we explore the roles of artists, craftspeople, architects and designers through different time periods, different cultural backgrounds and different artistic movements and aim to achieve our own personal best in every product we research and we create. Our curriculum is thoughtfully planned to engage and inspire all our learners. Our long term and medium-term plans map out Design Technology themes covered each half term for each key stage, as well as the critical knowledge children need to know and remember.
These plans define what we will teach to ensure an appropriate balance and distribution of work across each term. Art & Design objectives have been carefully linked to these themes to make the learning relevant and interesting within a realistic context.
Early years foundation stage
We believe that all learning begins in EYFS. Our curriculum is closely linked with the Early Years Framework to ensure children in EYFS are achieving those early skills within the subject, which will then enable them to continue to progress in art as they move through school. Additionally, planning and teaching in Design and Technology is fully inclusive ensuring that all children can access the curriculum at their level. Skills and related vocabulary are progressively built upon as children journey through our school. Cross-curricular links are emphasised, enabling the children to apply their skills and knowledge in other areas of the curriculum.
Design and construction is built in to children's daily practices and children are encouraged to build, design, evaluate and improve in their continuous provision and alongside core curriculum areas.
Enrichment Activities
TBC (SIP 24-25)
Impact
Children are assessed against our curriculum endpoints and ongoing assessments are based on the knowledge organisers for each unit. Teachers use a range of ongoing assessments to judge children’s key knowledge and understanding of art and design and ability to apply their their techniques and creativity skills to a range of situations. Through a variety of different methods: small assessment tasks, retrieval practice, low-stake quizzes, classroom responses a teacher judgement is created based around the year group end points for art.
Subject monitoring
Leaders monitor teaching and learning through pupil voice, staff questionnaires as well as book looks and learning walks and using the online app See Saw to record evidence of learning. The development of the children in school is also monitored through daily informal conversations.
As a result of our whole curriculum, we expect to see all children achieve well by developing knowledge and skills across the curriculum.  But we understand that art brings more than this, and aim to ensure that all children will:
- develop lifelong learning behaviours that help them continue to create and explore in art.
- appreciate the possibility of art as a career and give them the opportunity to have success in modern Britain.
- be responsible global citizens and courageous advocates of our community through the HEART Values we have instilled in them during their time in school.
- leave our school, fully equipped for the next stage in their learning
