Intent

At Thomas A Becket Junior School, we aim to encourage creativity, nurture innovation and develop life skills within design and technology lessons. 

Our aim is for our children to leave Thomas A Becket Junior School with the confidence to design, make and evaluate their own products that are fit for an intended purpose and user.

By the end of year 6, they should know how to identify a user’s needs and have the tools to be able to design, make and evaluate this product. They should also be able to prepare, bake and cook a range of dishes using a variety of cooking techniques and understand seasonality, and the impact of this on meal choice. 

At Thomas A Becket Junior School, we aim to ensure our design and technology lessons builds on knowledge and skills learnt in  previous year groups and make purposeful links, where appropriate, to other subject areas, including maths, computing, science and art.

Implementation

At Thomas A Becket Junior School, we bring learning to life by planning practical, engaging series of design and technology lessons. In these lessons, we teach our children the required knowledge and skills, as stated in the national curriculum, in a progressively logical sequence from year 3 to year 6. We have also designed bespoke knowledge organisers to help the children learn and remember the core knowledge from each design and technology unit that the children undertake throughout their time at TAB Junior. 

At the start of their time at our school, children are given the design criteria and required to design products for an intended user/customer, and then as they progress, the children are required to carry out their own research; finding out for themselves the needs of a user/customer and having to develop their own design criteria before designing and making a product that fulfils their user’s/customer’s needs and desires.

The children will also be taught how to evaluate a product against the given criteria, however, as they progress throughout their time at our school, they will be required to independently, and effectively, evaluate their products against their own design criteria, incorporating the talk phrases into discussions. 

Impact

By the time the children finish their four years at Thomas A Becket Junior School, they should have acquired important life skills and shown they have met the key stage two national curriculum objectives for design and technology.

They should have the knowledge and skills to independently  conduct product research (including the development of a design criteria), design, make and evaluate their own products informed by their own research.

They should also be able to independently prepare and cook a range of dishes using a range of cooking techniques, whilst understanding the importance of a healthy, balanced diet and considering the impact of seasonality.