Killingholme Primary School

Our Intent:

At Killingholme Primary, we promote a positive attitude to learning (based on our school vision of Partnerships + Potential + Performance = Success), encouraging our students to aspire to achieve their full potential by providing rich, motivational, purposeful and inspiring learning.

We aim to provide our students with a DT education that is relevant in our rapidly changing world.  We want to encourage our children to become problem solvers who can work creatively. We believe that high-quality DT lessons will inspire children to think independently, innovatively and develop creative, procedural and technical understanding. Our DT curriculum provides children with opportunities to research, generate ideas and represent them in a number of ways, explore and investigate, develop their ideas, make a product and evaluate their work. Students will use ICT to design, monitor and control their products. Children will be exposed to a wide range of media and through this, children will develop their knowledge, skills, vocabulary and resilience.

Our Implementation:

At Killingholme Primary, all teaching of DT follows the design, make and evaluate cycle. The design process is rooted in real life, relevant contexts to give meaning to learning. Students are given the opportunity to research designers, how their products are manufactured, understand tools and techniques used in different industries and how to apply cooking skills when working with different food types. While making, children are given a choice and a range of tools to choose freely from. To evaluate, children are able to evaluate their own products against a design criterion. Each of these steps is rooted in technical knowledge and vocabulary. The children at Killingholme work responsibly and with regard to how others around them are working.

They have respect for other people’s views and different designs; being positive about everyone’s achievements. The children understand that they have personal freedoms with the creativity of their designs and they are always encouraged to use their resilience and perseverance.

Key skills and key knowledge for DT have been mapped across the school to ensure progression between year groups. This also ensures that there is a context for the children’s work in Design Technology; that they learn about real life structures and the purpose of specific examples, as well as developing their skills throughout the programme of study.

At the beginning of each unit, children create a concept map, where they are able to write down any knowledge they currently know about the topic ahead. They then add and build upon this each week at the end of a lesson in green pen. This creates a working document, which the children have ownership of, to show the knowledge which has been learnt throughout the term. At the end of the unit, children are given an exit task to measure the progress. In addition to this, at the beginning of each lesson, a retrieval practise activity is given to the children about the previous weeks' learning to bring the knowledge back to the forefront. This is known to the children as ‘It’s Nothing New’. We use assessment for learning to ensure all lessons are relevant and will help to plan for next steps.

Child speak skills mats can be found in the front of foundation subject books and these ensure children not only know what they are learning, but also the skills they are learning to be a designer. 

Subject co-ordinators are given regular time to ensure resources are kept up to date, to monitor subjects across the school, create action plans and provide subject feedback to SLT as appropriate. Subject leads once a term will also generate a standards report, based on the teacher's assessment of students over the term. This will inform their next steps in their subject.

The Impact:

Throughout their design technology journey at Killingholme Primary, children will have clear enjoyment and confidence in Design and Technology that they will then apply to other areas of the curriculum. Students will ultimately know more, remember more and understand more about Design Technology, demonstrating this progression of skills, knowledge and understanding when using tools or skills in other areas of the curriculum and in opportunities out of school.  The majority of children in each year group will be working at or above age related expectations and as designers, children will develop skills and attributes they can use beyond school and into adulthood. Design Technology is monitored by the subject leader throughout the year in the form of book monitoring, looking at outcomes and pupil interviews to discuss their learning and understanding and establish the impact of the teaching taking place.