"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

Steve Jobs

Intent

At Trinity All Saints Primary School, it is our intention to provide a high-quality design 
technology (D.T) education that provides children with the foundations they need 
to recognise the importance of D.T and how it goes beyond the classroom and could 
potentially help with future employment. 
Our curriculum will enable children to broaden their horizons as children will have 
many opportunities to learn to use real-life tools through hands-on experiences. We 
believe that our D.T lessons will inspire creativity, problem-solving and technical 
skills. 
Teachers will ensure that all children are exposed to high quality teaching and 
learning experiences as we aim to nurture and celebrate each child’s creativity and 
skills by ensuring we provide multiple opportunities for a child to express themselves 
through their own designs whether that be by sewing, in woodwork or in food 
technology. 
Children will be encouraged to take risks within their own DT lessons by being brave
and building on the skills which they have developed from each year at Trinity All 
Saints. Our D.T curriculum aims to make a difference in each child’s life through 
developing resilience as, like many designers/ builders, they will have to learn from 
their mistakes to perfect their craft to their best ability. 

Implementation 

Trinity All Saints use their own unit plans with each year group focusing on:
• Levers
• Moving parts (not Year 5 + 6)
• Cooking
• Electric circuits (not Year 1 + 2)
• Structure
• Textiles
This allows teachers to ensure that planning is sequenced, skills are being developed 
upon whilst having purposeful D.T outcomes. This has been designed for our 
children to ensure that key skills and knowledge is being built upon year after year.

Each unit of learning with follow the same sequence of learning:

• Research.

• Design.

• Make.

• Evaluate.

Each year, skills are built upon and knowledge is secured and developed through the work of ‘Memory retrieval’ where children are asked to reflect on prior learning and how it will support their learning in future projects. Children will use real tools such as saws, hammers, g-clamps and knives. It is vital that children are shown how to use these tools in safe and calm manner so that they can develop these skills for when they leave Primary school. D.T books are used to track progress and are used throughout the school from Reception to Year 6. Children are encouraged to take pride in their work by ensuring presentation is neat, D.T vocabulary is being used and evaluations are being used throughout to allow children to become critical thinkers of their outcomes.

Impact

The successful approach to the teaching of D.T at Trinity All Saints Primary School will result in a high-quality outcomes, tools being used as well as develop evaluation skills. We place a huge emphasis that D.T is for all learners no matter your background/ ability and adaptations will be made to ensure that all children will succeed.

Children at Trinity All Saints Primary School will:

• Demonstrate a love of D.T and an interest in further study and be exposed to future jobs in this field.

• Retain knowledge that is pertinent to DT with a real-life context.

• Be able to question ideas and reflect on knowledge.

• Be able to articulate their understanding of different strands of D.T

• Work collaboratively and practically to build, create, cook and evaluate.

• Develop skills throughout their time at Trinity All Saints so they leave Primary school with a good level of DT skills.

• Achieve age related expectations in D.T at the end of their cohort year.