Intent of Design and Technology 

At Olton Primary School, children receive a design and technology curriculum that allows them to exercise their creativity through designing and making. The children are taught to combine their designing and making skills with knowledge and understanding in order to design and make a product. Skills are taught progressively to ensure that all children are able to learn and practice in order to develop as they move through the school.

Evaluation is an integral part of the design process and allows children to adapt and improve their product, this is a key skill that they need throughout their life. D&T allows children to apply the knowledge and skills learned in other subjects, particularly Maths, Science and Art.

Children’s interests are captured through theme learning, ensuring that links are made in a cross-curricular way, giving children motivation and meaning for their learning. Children will also learn basic cooking skills, which can be applied to their daily life. 

In 2021-22, Olton Primary has embraced a revision to our Design and Technology Curriculum in response to the pandemic and opportunities that some of our children may have missed as a result of lockdowns. We have adopted Kapow D&T scheme because we feel it offers cultural breadth and depth. 

Implementation of Design and Technology (knowledge and skills) 

Our whole curriculum is shaped by our school vision which aims to enable all children, regardless of background, ability, additional needs, to flourish to become the very best version of themselves they can possibly be.

We teach the National Curriculum, supported by clear skills and knowledge progression. This ensures that skills and knowledge are built on year by year and sequenced appropriately to maximise learning for all children. 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 choices and a range of tools to choose freely from.

- To evaluate, children should be able to evaluate their own products against 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.

The key skills we teach the children are:  

· sewing and textiles  

· cooking and nutrition  

· electrical and mechanical components  

· using materials 

Impact of Design and Technology

We monitor the impact of the design and technology curriculum through various means including: pupil voice, end of unit assessments and learning walks. These are analysed on and a 'School Improvement Plan' for computing produced which contributes to the whole school ongoing continuous improvement cycle and whole school self-evaluation.