Vision

At Roxbourne, we feel it is vital to nurture creativity and innovation through design, and by exploring the designed and made world in which we all live and work.

Curriculum Design: How our curriculum is constructed and why?

Our Design and Technology curriculum gives pupils the opportunity to develop skills, knowledge and understanding of designing and making functional products. The curriculum for Design and Technology draws on learning from a wide range of other subjects, including maths for accurate measurements, art for designing and evaluative understanding and computing skills for researching and designing. Furthermore, we create cross-curricular links and opportunities to apply their learning during residentials where pupils will prepare, purchase and cook their own food or through whole school events, such as the Summar Fair, where pupils will design, make and sell products. This allows our pupils to practically apply their knowledge and skills when they are designing and creating new products. During the process, pupils are immersed in subject-specific language, and develop the confidence to use this vocabulary to articulate their ideas clearly. Each unit is based on one of the three key strands of cook, sew and build which provide the scope for all the knowledge and skill within the Design and Technology Curriculum. Within each of these units, pupils will be taught the aspects of design, process of design, context and events, existing designers and products and cross-curricular links.

Curriculum Delivery: What our curriculum looks and feels like in action?

Within our school timetable, there is an hour a week dedicated to either Art and Design or Design and Technology, depending on the unit of study in the curriculum overview. Each unit is linked to the wider curriculum so that learning is interconnected and built on prior learning. We are fortunate to also have access to a fully resourced Art Room and Food Tech Room, which provide the ideal learning environment for designing and making products. Our Design and Technology curriculum is taught by the class teacher who will develop the planning and adaptation based on resources provided through our partnership with the DT Association. These resources are linked to the unit of study and help to embed key knowledge and skills.

Impact: How do we know our pupils are learning, understanding and remembering our intended curriculum?

Our teachers use the progression framework from the DT Association in order to support pupil attainment and progress and to track the progress pupils make against the National Curriculum. We appreciate that there is low curriculum agreement between Design and Technology and assessment due to the variability and range of knowledge and skills, for example, a pupil may be more inept at cookery than building. Therefore, we promote our teachers to take a holistic view of assessment by reviewing a pupils' abilities across the different strands of Design and Technology.