D&T and Food

The United Curriculum for Design & Technology provides all children, regardless of their background, with:

Substantive knowledge:

• Ensuring pupils master core content through the development of conceptual knowledge of structures, mechanisms, materials and programming in small steps, and the timely revisiting of this key knowledge.
• Ensuring that pupils are explicitly taught and have time to master procedural knowledge, including craftsmanship of cutting, shaping, joining and finishing as well as engineering in focused practical tasks.
• Making explicit and deliberate links to other curriculum subjects – particularly science – to ensure that pupils use and apply scientific concepts in a Design & Technology setting at the appropriate time. Pupils also draw on and further develop knowledge and skills first taught in Mathematics, History, Computing and Art & Design, due to the multi-disciplinary nature of Design & Technology.

Disciplinary knowledge:

• Reinforcing the iterative design process in the heart of every unit, and allowing pupils to build their understanding and ability to apply design values gradually from EYFS to Key Stage 2 and beyond.
• Ensuring that pupils know they are designers and engineers, who design a solution to fit a specific user and need; they are not led by outcomes. Pupils should be encouraged to design products using all of the knowledge they have developed across the curriculum.
• Explicitly teaching ways of designing, ways of generating ideas and ways of identifying user needs, to give pupils the tools they need to thrive as designers of the future.

Curiosity and excitement about the possibilities offered by Design & Technology:

• Ensuring that all pupils can see themselves reflected in the Design & Technology curriculum, by exploring the contributions made by a wide range of designers, past and present.
• Opportunities to develop character by understanding the difficulties faced by those designers and seeing how characteristics such as resilience and risk taking contributed towards success.
• Understanding the contribution that design and technology makes to creativity, culture, wealth and the well-being of a nation and that more opportunities exist than ever before due to technological advances.

The United Curriculum for Food provides all pupils, regardless of their background, with:

Substantive knowledge:

• Ensuring pupils master core content through the development of conceptual knowledge of food sources, safety, hygiene and nutrition in small steps, and the timely revisiting of this key knowledge.
• Ensuring that pupils are explicitly taught and have time to master procedural knowledge, including cooking skills of chopping, preparing, combining and heating in focused practical tasks.
• Making explicit and deliberate links to other curriculum subjects – particularly science – to ensure that pupils use and apply scientific concepts, such as nutrition and food chains, in a Food setting at the appropriate time.

Disciplinary knowledge:

• Ensuring that pupils are taught how to make food choices based on qualities like nutritional value; dietary requirements; cost; seasonality; food miles and carbon footprint of production; time to prepare; and quantities. These qualities are introduced in small steps but applied cumulatively so that by Year 6, pupils are able to make decisions based on a selection of them.

The ability, and desire, to cook balanced, sustainable meals for themselves and their family:

• Ensuring that the recipes and foods chosen reflect relevant cuisines from the local context, the UK and around the world.
• Providing recipes that are balanced and sustainable, which can be cooked after school in a family context.

The implementation of the United Curriculum for Design & Technology reflects our broader teaching and learning principles:

For Design & Technology in particular:

• Content is always carefully situated within existing schemas. Every unit considers the prior knowledge that is prerequisite for that unit and builds on that knowledge to develop a deeper understanding of that concept.
• Vertical concepts are used within lessons to connect aspects of learning.
• Disciplinary knowledge is explicitly taught to pupils and carefully sequenced to ensure pupils are provided with opportunities to practice these skills throughout the curriculum. 
• Opportunities for extended, scholarly writing appear throughout the curriculum. These have a clear purpose and audience and, crucially, allow pupils to write as a technologist.

DT & Food at Queen’s Manor Primary School is taught, generally, in alternate half-terms and is cross curricular.  In EYFS, Design & Technology is taught through the EYFS framework through focused modelling and daily provision activities.  

Teachers are provided with an additional three planning days per year on top of their PPA, to plan their curriculum.

As part of this planning process, teachers need to plan the following:  

• All lessons are planned around Rosenshine’s Ten Principals of Instruction framework and we believe that this alongside the use of Kagan structures promotes cooperative learning as well as enquiry.   
• A cycle of lessons for each subject, which carefully plans for progression and depth.  
• Children sketches and drawings should show the build-up of knowledge and skills needed to create a purposeful product.  
• Children will be given the opportunity in each lesson to evaluate an aspect of their learning.  
• Trips and visiting experts who will enhance the learning experience.    
• A means to display and celebrate the pupils’ design and technology work in their class.

Our DT & Food curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression year on year, giving pupils the skills and knowledge and vocabulary that they need to move forward in their learning, alongside opportunities to apply their knowledge to different situations.  If children are keeping up with the curriculum, they are deemed to be making good or better progress. In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:    

• Pupil discussions about their learning; which includes discussion of their thoughts, ideas, processing and evaluations of work. 
• A reflection on standards achieved against the planned outcomes;   
• Each class will have the opportunity to share and discuss their new product with a different class.   

Our DT & Food curriculum is also planned in a way which promotes the cultural capital of all our children. We enhance our curriculum especially for the most disadvantaged by organising school trips, promoting careers with design and engineering, and focusing on how DT can be used in the wider world.

In general, this is done through:

• Books/products/floor books and pupil-conferencing: Talking to pupils about their work allows teachers to assess how much of the curriculum content is secure. These conversations are used most effectively to determine whether pupils have a good understanding of the vertical concepts, and if they can link recently taught content to learning from previous units.
• Formative assessment in lessons: There are opportunities for formative assessment in the lesson slides provided, and teachers continually adapt their lesson delivery to address misconceptions and ensure that pupils are keeping up with the content.
• Low-stakes summative assessment: We also use multiple-choice questions (or another low-stakes quiz) at the end of the unit to assess whether pupils have learned the core knowledge for that unit. These are used formatively, and teachers plan to fill gaps and address misconceptions before moving on.

• Talk about different products around you, the materials they are made from and what they feel like.
• Take your child to the supermarket and look at the different fruits and vegetables. Talk about healthy eating and why it is important.
• Use recycling as an opportunity to create different products.
• Encourage your child to help you cook at home and talk to them about different cooking processes as you do it.

• Visit the Design Museum. There are a variety of workshops aimed at children aged 8-11 years available to book on to which can be found here https://designmuseum.org/whats-on/talks-courses-and-workshops
• Encourage your child to help you cook at home and talk to them about different cooking processes as you do it.