At Cheapside Primary School, Design & Technology is taught in a creative, inspiring and practical way so that every child can acquire a range of strategies and skills to enable them to investigate and understand how products are designed, made and evaluated. Design & Technology is a practical subject that teaches children essential life skills alongside the importance of health and safety. For example, we teach children how to follow proper procedures for food, safety and hygiene and how to use different tools safely. Risk assessments are completed before every lesson.

Design & Technology is looked at across a range of real life contexts within school, home and the local community.

We teach Design & Technology through 5 ‘Key Concepts’ across Key Stage 1 and 2. The Key Concepts and skills build on each other to ensure progression across the school.

The 5 Key Concepts of Design & Technology comprise:

Design, Evaluation and Improvements (KS1 children will learn that designs need to be purposeful,
functional and appealing)

• Food
• Textiles
• Mechanisms
• Construction

We also celebrate ‘Key Figures’ in Design & Technology in a variety of ways such as delivering whole school assemblies to teach and inspire pupils and help further drive a passion for design from the past to the present in the hope that our children will become the designers of the future.

At Cheapside, work is often linked to other areas of the curriculum so the children in Year 1 are given an opportunity to showcase their DT work by planning, designing and making castles linked to their Turrets & Tiaras topic; they then evaluate their work and then present their finished designs in class for the head teacher to come around to discuss and see their work and in KS2, Year 6 study WW2 in History and as part of this design and create and their own scaled-down Anderson Shelters. The whole school takes part in termly design competitions, for example a Christmas-themed design competition such as a designing and making a Christmas hat for the Christmas fair. The competitions are popular for the whole school and also a great way to bring the Cheapside Primary School community together. In the Summer Term, children are given an opportunity to be vote for the ‘Designer of the Year’ across all year groups: each class teacher, looks at each child’s work over the last year and puts forward their designer of the year award.

These children take great pride in having an opportunity to have achievements and hard work celebrated by the
rest of the school.

	Design & Technology at Cheapside School	[pdf 308KB]
	Design and technology programmes of study- key stages 1 and 2	[pdf 105KB]