As a school and in accordance with the National Curriculum’s expectations, we aim to ensure that all pupils have opportunities to:

 

• Produce creative and imaginative work, exploring their ideas and recording their experiences
• Become proficient in manipulating simple tools safely, understanding properties of different materials and how they can be joined as well as basic design techniques
• Evaluate and analyse creative works using the language of craft and design
• Know about designers of a range of products and buildings, and understand the historical and cultural development of their art forms
• Plan, design, build, critique, test and evaluate their own products
• Use technology and computing effectively to participate successfully in an ever increasing technological world
• To understand the principles of nutrition and learn how to cook
• Build on and develop their subject specific vocabulary. Through a whole-school approach of Word Aware, the vocabulary is graded on a scale of ‘Anchor’, ‘Goldilocks’ and ‘Step-up’ topic-specific words.

Class teachers are responsible for teaching design technology, although there will be times when professional facilitators could be involved in the teaching of the topic. We have worked with the Primary Engineering Project for a number of years to develop the children’s expertise. Children working at the ‘exceeding’ level in design technology are proud to have produced their work and show case their individual talents.

 

Classes are given design home learning to link with their topics when appropriate and the children always produce high quality pieces. This also gives the opportunity to work with their families to plan and design their pieces.

Each class, from Reception to Y5 take part in a ‘mini-business challenge’ topic week where the children plan, design and make a product to sell to family, friends and the community.  All children take part in this enterprise regardless of ability and recent examples include slime in Y2, soaps in Y4 and Christmas decorations in Reception & Y1.

 

Our oldest children take part in the Oldham Year 6 Business Challenge to plan, purchase materials (using a loan, maximum £100) and make a product with all profits going to their chosen charity.  The children take part in a ‘Trade Day’ at our local Tesco Extra and compete with other Y6 businesses.  They are judged by ‘mystery shoppers’ on the quality and durability of their product, presentation of their stall, sales technique and profit margins.  This amazing opportunity encourages the children to develop business skills and an understanding of quality assurance during a real-life experience. There is also a ‘Dragon’s Den’ element to the competition which also helps to hone essential skills in our children including presenting to an audience and answering tricky questions under pressure.

We also take every opportunity to develop links with outside agencies and experts, through links with our Dovestone Learning Partnership (DLP) in order to enrich our Art and Design provision.