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  1. Home
  2. Curriculum
  3. Subjects
  4. Design Technology

Welcome to Design Technology

Why do we learn Design Technology?
Primary
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Secondary
Year 7
Year 8
Year 9
Year 10
Year 11

Why do we learn design technology?

Design and Technology empowers students to recognize, analyze, and address challenges through innovative thinking, strategic planning, and design implementation using various mediums, materials, and tools. Students acquire technical and design proficiency, fostering skills like initiative, resourcefulness, inquiry, and creativity. Additionally, they enhance their communication abilities essential for design creation and assessment.

Primary

We believe that the subjects of art and design technology embody some of the highest forms of human creativity and as such, we seek to engage, inspire and challenge pupils, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art and design. We have deliberately planned our art and design technology units to ensure that key foci for each subject are spread over the year, ensuring there are opportunities for children to explore a range of media, materials, tools and concepts over the course of their journey in the primary phase. Additionally, our art curriculum has been designed to incorporate the teaching of key art skills (line, colour, shape, form, pattern, texture) which have been mapped across Key Stage 1 and 2 to ensure these skills are revisited.

Year 1

Autumn 1 Autumn 2
Art Unit taught Art Unit taught
Spring 1 Spring 2

DT Focus: Materials and Mechanisms 

Design and create a vehicle

Art Unit taught
Summer 1 Summer 2

DT Focus: Design and Mechanisms

Create a picture with multiple moving parts

DT focus: Food 

Making fruit kebabs

All Year 1 subjects

Year 2

Autumn 1 Autumn 2
Art Unit taught Art Unit taught
Spring 1 Spring 2

DT Focus: Design and Materials 

Animal hand puppets 

Art Unit taught
Summer 1 Summer 2

DT Focus: Materials and Structures 

Pot Plant Holders

Art Unit taught

All Year 2 subjects

Year 3

Autumn 1 Autumn 2
Art Unit taught

DT Focus: Food

Making cookies

Spring 1 Spring 2

Art Unit taught

Art Unit taught
Summer 1 Summer 2

DT Focus: Design 

Designing and Making a shield

DT Focus: Structures 

Making mini-greenhouses

All Year 3 subjects

Year 4

Autumn 1 Autumn 2

DT Focus: Structures 

Making a viking ship

Art Unit taught
Spring 1 Spring 2

Art Unit taught

Art Unit taught
Summer 1 Summer 2

DT Focus: Design and Materials 

Making a diorama

Art Unit taught

All Year 4 subjects

Year 5

Autumn 1 Autumn 2

Art Unit taught

Art Unit taught
Spring 1 Spring 2

DT Focus: Food 

Baking Bread
 

Art Unit taught
Summer 1 Summer 2

Art Unit taught

DT Focus: Design and Mechanisms

Design and make a toy

All Year 5 subjects

Year 6

Autumn 1 Autumn 2

Art Unit taught

Art Unit taught
Spring 1 Spring 2

Art Unit taught

Art Unit taught
Summer 1 Summer 2

DT Focus: Design and Materials

Design and make a bird box

DT Focus: Structures and Mechanisms 

Construct a working fairground ride 

All Year 6 subjects

Secondary

In KS3 students explore creativity through a variety of projects which explore Art, Design and Technology. This gives students a broad experience of different materials, techniques and processes, facilitated by the investigation of a wide range of artists, designers and movements.

KS4 DT explores 6 material groups. These are: Woods, metals, plastics, electronics, papers and boards and textiles. For all these groups, we will learn about the journey of the material, from where it comes from to how we make products with it and how we dispose of it. We go into further detail with timbers and polymers as they are our specialist materials. For these materials, we learn about industrial machines that we can use with them and what products we can make. There is also a huge amount of practical work which takes place as part of our NEA and also it helps us learn the theory for our exam. Our students learn how to use machinery and tools in our workshop such as saws, sanding machines and a laser cutter. For the NEA, students create their own product from start to finish. They begin researching around an area that intersts them, designing a product and then making it independently. 

Year 7

Autumn 1 Autumn 2
Formal elements

Paul Hoppe

Perspective

Spring 1 Spring 2
Portraiture Food and Nutrition
Summer 1 Summer 2
Keyring

Technical Drawing

All Year 7 subjects

Year 8

Autumn 1 Autumn 2
Klari Reis    Printing Food & Nutrition
Spring 1 Spring 2
Grayson Perry      Ceramics Lamp                 Resistant  Materials/ Electronics
Summer 1 Summer 2
Typographic Sculpture Graphics             Formal elements review

All Year 8 subjects

Year 9

Autumn 1 Autumn 2

Mariyan Atanasov Perspective

Tote bag

Spring 1 Spring 2

Jewellery             3D Design

David Mansot     Ramshackle Cabins

Summer 1 Summer 2

Jewellery - Metal work

Speaker Resistant Materials

All Year 9 subjects

Year 10

Autumn 1 Autumn 2

Introduction to practical processes. Theoretical content

Introduction to practical processes. Theoretical content

Spring 1 Spring 2

Mini NEA. Theoretical content

Mini NEA. Theoretical content

Summer 1 Summer 2

Mini NEA. Theoretical content

Real NEA. Theoretical content

All Year 10 subjects Next Year 10 Subject - Business Studies

Year 11

Autumn 1 Autumn 2
NEA research. Theoretical content NEA designing. Theoretical content
Spring 1 Spring 2
NEA making. Theoretical content Revision
Summer 1 Summer 2
Revision GCSE exams

All Year 11 subjects Next Year 11 Subject - Business Studies

  • Art and Design
  • Biology
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020 8385 4370

Ark Academy, Bridge Road, Wembley, HA9 9JP

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