DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY
INTENT
At Brierley Hill Primary School, we are DESIGNERS!
We want our children to love design technology. We want them to feel ambitious and feel able to access roles as architects, graphic designers, chefs or carpenters
Design and Technology is dynamic and multidimensional. It is our intention that our D&T curriculum will provide opportunities to solve real and relevant problems, allowing our pupils to develop essential everyday skills and unlock their potential to be the designers and innovators of tomorrow. The D&T curriculum will encourage children to learn, to think and intervene creatively to solve problems both as an individual and as part of a team.
Design and Technology will allow all Brierley Hill Primary pupils to put their learning from other areas of the curriculum into practice, and will work to enhance and deepen their understanding of those areas, including maths, computing, science, and art.
Brierley Hill Primary pupils will learn about cooking, food and nutrition, ensuring that they acquire the fundamental life skills in order to be able to feed themselves healthily and independently, whilst learning about where food comes from, therefore making connections with their geographical and scientific knowledge.
IMPLEMENTATION
Our curriculum is structured to introduce and revisit knowledge, following the principles of instruction, guided by understanding how the memory works and cognitive load theory.
The CUSP Design and Technology curriculum is organised into blocks with each block covering a particular set of disciplines, including food and nutrition, mechanisms, structures, systems, electrical systems, understanding materials and textiles. Vertical progression in each discipline has been deliberately woven into the fabric of the curriculum so that pupils revisit key disciplines throughout their Primary journey at increasing degrees of challenge and complexity.
In addition to the core knowledge required to be successful within each discipline, the curriculum outlines key aspects of development in the Working as a Designer section. Each module will focus on promoting different aspects of these competencies. This will support teachers in understanding pupils’ progress as designers more broadly, as well as how successfully they are acquiring the taught knowledge and skills.