Design Technology
Intent:
Be the best we can be now and in our futures: to express our ideas creatively with pride, purpose and high expectations by fostering disciplined creativity.
Ambition for all: ensuring that no child’s circumstances define their outcomes: we believe that every child can develop and thrive in DT with the right support.
Nurture a healthy mind, body and soul: children feel confident and are not afraid to take risks in learning and creation, fostering a love of DT.
Develop a crew mentality for our school, the Rock Ferry community and our world: learning to work as a team and value the contributions of others while expressing our own individuality through our own and shared design projects.
Implement:
To put our intent into action, we plan at three levels: long-term, medium-term, short-term. We use CUSP scheme in Y1 – Y6 to support the subject knowledge of our subject leader and class teachers at each stage of planning:
Long-Term: Our subject leader maps out what children should learn in each unit throughout school. This is mapped out by our subject leader because they see the bigger picture of DT across the school, ensuring your child is taught everything required of the Early Years Framework and National Curriculum. In Early Years, early foundations for DT are taught within the expressive art and design aspect of Development Matters.
Our subject leader carefully considers the order content is taught across school so that what your child learns makes sense year on year. We deliberately plan opportunities to return to key ideas throughout your child’s time at Rock Ferry so your child can build lasting memory and deepen their understanding each time they return to a key concept.
Medium-Term: Teachers use the long-term plan to know what they need to teach. At the medium-term planning phase, they carefully consider the sequence of learning within a unit of work so that knowledge builds logically and gives children opportunity to return to ideas, apply them and refine their understanding.
Short-Term: Your child’s teacher plans each lesson for the learning sequence, considering how best to teach the content set out in the long-term and medium-term plans so that it sticks. When planning lessons, your child’s class teacher will consider the needs of your child and the class they are in. This may mean returning to ideas they have struggled to grasp in earlier lessons or putting adaptations in place to ensure everyone can access the lesson such as word banks, writing slopes and scaffolded responses.
Impact:
To ensure children have learned what we have intended them to, teachers regularly plan small tasks within lessons that lets them see what your child has understood. This allows them to respond to your child’s need if they haven’t understood a key idea. This may be offering support or re-teaching within the lesson or adapting the following lesson plans to address bigger misconceptions.
Subject leaders and senior leaders regularly speak to children to see what they have remembered, look in their books to check the quality of their work and visit lessons. We use this information to review the quality of our curriculum and identify any areas where we could make it even better.