Curriculum Intent

At Spa Academy, we utilise Kapow for our Design Technology curriculum which is inspiring, rigorous, and practical. We aim to inspire our pupils to be creative, resilient and most importantly have fun creating their products. We will do this by focusing on making the learning relevant to the children and their lives and exposing them to the following skills: design, construction, cooking and nutrition, use of tools, exploring mechanisms, electrical systems, computing and evaluating existing products. The National Curriculum for Design and Technology ensures that by using creativity and imagination, pupils design and make products that solve real and relevant problems within a variety of contexts, considering their own and others’ needs, wants and values. We strive for our pupils to be experimental and learn that it is okay to make mistakes and to build on these to improve as designers.  

Our Design and Technology curriculum is split into two discrete learning blocks. In Autumn 2, children create a product for our annual Christmas fair. Taking part in sewing, woodworking, and creating moving parts. In Summer 2, children prepare a food and nutrition dish as well as learning about the farming and business side of creating food. They learn skills such as frying, proving, grilling and baking. Once the product is completed, evaluating in DT should encourage children to become more resilient learners, giving them the opportunity to learn from mistakes and improve their models. To make our pupils excellent communicators we aim to promote the language rich Design Technology curriculum that is essential to the knowledge and understanding in Design Technology. The promotion and use of an accurate and rich vocabulary throughout school is planned in Design Technology. Collaborative learning is very important at Spa Academy therefore in Design and Technology children may well be asked to solve problems and develop their learning independently or as part of a team. This allows the children to have ownership over their curriculum and lead their own learning in Design Technology as well as developing social and teamwork skills working alongside others.  We aim to, wherever possible, link work to other disciplines such as mathematics, science, engineering, computing and art. The children are also given opportunities to reflect upon and evaluate past and present design technology, its uses and its effectiveness and are encouraged to become innovators and risk-takers. Our Design and Technology curriculum plans to activate prior learning from year 2 through to year 6 content. Therefore, all children including our SEN and most disadvantaged pupils can access all aspects of our curriculum.  

We want Design and Technology to prepare our children, to give them the opportunities, responsibilities, and experiences they need to be successful in later life.