Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency

Last updated: 28 January 2009

 

This page describes how design and technology meets the requirements of the national curriculum.

The national curriculum allows schools to meet the individual learning needs of pupils and to develop a distinctive character and ethos rooted in their local communities.

Education in design and technology enables teachers to capitalise on their own personal interests and expertise, the special concerns of their community and the diverse interests and creative enthusiasms of their students.

The national curriculum requires subjects to be robust enough to define and defend the core of knowledge and cultural experience which is the entitlement of every pupil.

Education in design and technology is about acquiring a discipline of physical and intellectual skills and the knowledge and understanding to support and give purpose to those skills.

Design and technology is the activity that produced The Pyramids, Stonehenge, irrigation schemes, agriculture, musical instruments, roads, bridges, airports, computers, television, mobile phones and much, much more. It produces the technologies used by artists and composers and the media for writers to communicate with readers.

    

    

The national curriculum requires subjects to be flexible enough to give teachers the scope to build their teaching around it in ways which will enhance its delivery to their pupils.

Education in design and technology is not about forcing pupils into a predetermined mould, it is about igniting a flame of enthusiasm for being creative, making things and understanding how things work and are made.

The national curriculum aims to foster pupils’ creativity and gives teachers discretion to find the best ways to inspire in their pupils a joy and commitment to learning that will last a lifetime.

Education in design and technology is not simply a matter of following a series of projects involving the activities of designing and making. Neither can it be dictated as a single expertise such as woodworking, silversmithing, robotics, cooking, pottery, model making, architecture or civil engineering. But what is common about it is its creativity, its level of skills and its dependence on knowledge and understanding (ie the technologies).

     

                    

By the very creative nature of design and technology the actual content of its discipline cannot be predetermined; that would constrain thinking rather than open minds to new opportunities and possibilities.

 

 

 

 

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