Intent
Our intent is to provide our children with an engaging, exciting and empowering curriculum that allows them to develop as confident responsible citizens equipped with the skills that will allow them to be successful in our ever-changing world, both in the present and the future.
We believe that childhood should be a happy, investigative and enquiring time in our lives. We constantly provide enrichment opportunities (memorable experiences) to engage learners and develop their cultural capital which has been recognised as essential if children are to succeed.
We believe that our children should not only reach their best academically, but also develop a thirst for knowledge, foster a love of learning and leave our school with exceptional independent learning skills.
We are fully committed to developing each child’s unique potential within a secure and caring environment.
We use our Captain Webb Values to promote positive attitudes to learning:
Listen
Encourage
Achieve
Respect
Nurture
At Captain Webb, we want children to be inspired and enthused by the idea of designing, creating and making. Our Design and Technology curriculum allows children to exercise their creativity and become critical thinkers. Throughout their time at Captain Webb, children make meaningful cross-curricular links and apply the knowledge and skills they learn in other subjects to produce meaningful products.
Our practical, design-centred learning teaches children to take risks and become resourceful, innovative and enterprising individuals. Through our Design and Technology curriculum, we provide pupils with key knowledge, which enable them to develop the skills required to become future builders, designers and engineers of the world.
Implementation
Our pupils leave Captain Webb with all of the knowledge and skills required to be innovative risk-takers. Our curriculum has been thoughtfully planned to ensure that the knowledge children have is built upon within every Design and Technology unit. Knowledge within our Design and Technology curriculum is split into several stands, including: Food, Cooking and Nutrition, Structure, Textiles, Mechanisms (KS1) and Mechanical & Electronic Systems (KS2). These are mapped out across year groups to ensure progression.
Our planning ensures we teach the knowledge, understanding and skills needed to engage in the exciting process of designing and making. Children are required to plan and create products that consider function and purpose, and which are also relevant to real-life scenarios. Children look at existing designs to analyse and assess their effectiveness and then they consider ways of redesigning and reconstructing it to improve its overall success. At Captain Webb, we encourage children to use their imagination to design and make products that solve real and relevant problems within a variety of contexts. Our children are required to consider others’ wants and needs by following a design brief.
Design and Technology at Captain Webb is often taught as a block, or sometimes timetabled as a whole day, so that children’s learning is focused throughout each unit of work. At the beginning of each topic, initial assessments are completed to determine prior knowledge and ensure that progression is consistent. Evaluation is a key aspect of the Design and Technology process and children are given the opportunity to assess and ‘tinker’ their designs, continually looking to improve their work.
Impact
As well as monitoring of attainment, the impact of effective Design and Technology teaching is assessed through the pupil’s ability to evaluate, design, make and improve their own work.
The impact of Design and Technology is also evident within the opportunities we provide to develop cultural capital. We do this across the curriculum and throughout the school by:
• Working with local companies to promote future career choices
• Cooking for a purpose so children learn to be passionate about working with, preparing and tasting food
• Implementing a high standard of hygiene learning when working with food
• Using tools to help children manage risks
• Visiting local restaurant’s to help children embrace cultural influences on the food we cook and the diversity of the ingredients available for us to cook with
• Displaying products that children have made so they can experience the suitability first hand (bird houses in forest schools)
• Designing and creating for a purpose when making a blanket for a local care home
• Studying famous engineering experts through STEM and communicating ideas and developing prototypes using CAD
• Involving children in enterprise activities so children can begin to make links between cost of produce and materials, and the profit that can be made
DT Policy
DT Key Skills and Knowledge