Introducing our new PKC DT Curriculum

PKC DT Curriculum

We are excited to announce that our DT curriculum will be available from January 2023. Take a look at the subject rationale and curriculum map to see what’s in store! You can also sign up for a free webinar, ‘Introducing DT’ on 10th January 2023.

Drafting the curriculum has been an exciting journey – not least because it has emphasised what an important subject this is in the modern world. When you start to consider how the stuff around us has been made and designed you realise how integral the process of design is to our lives. Everything we use, from the interior of the bus to the office chair, the lemon squeezer, potato peeler, car door or latest fashion (and the computer or phone which you read this on) has been designed. Design is also central to the clever solutions we need to address the global problems we face, such as windfarms, solar panels, electric cars, micro farms, energy saving lightbulbs, sustainable fashion – the list is endless.

So – DT is important – and as such we need to teach it properly in our schools. That can, of course, feel like a challenge, and mostly for reasons of time. How on earth do we fit another subject, which many of us have little knowledge and experience of, into our busy timetables, particularly one which requires the extensive use of resources.

The National Curriculum defines the subject very broadly at primary level – cooking, nutrition, mechanisms, sewing, structures, electricity. We have split these into three areas ‘cook’, ‘sew’ and ‘build’. Our curriculum provides for each year group to do 15 hours of DT per year. This is divided into 3 units, one for each area and each designed to take five hours. Schools can choose to teach a whole unit in a single day or to break the unit up into 4 (‘sew’ and ‘build’) or 6 (‘cook’) sessions. We have thought about this model carefully within our own schools, recognising that there needs to be flexible, realistic timetabling to ensure that the subject is given proper attention and is not side-lined.

We have made the decision not to include computer aided design and programming in our PKC scheme of work (which is specified in the DT National Curriculum for Key Stage 2), as this tends to be comprehensively covered by the computing curriculum in schools. If you are a leader of DT, this is something to have oversight of.

DT is also a subject which draws extensively on and utilises concepts from other subjects, for example forces in science, measuring and weighing in maths, the environment and sustainability in geography, to name a few examples. Because of the breadth of the subject and its connection to other disciplines we have thought very carefully about how the curriculum is sequenced. It has been designed so that concepts and skills gradually build: a child is not going to be able to do backstitch before they have learnt how to do running stitch; and a child cannot make a pizza before they have practiced the knife skills which enable them to chop vegetables. It also links comprehensively with knowledge pupils will acquire in other subjects covered by PKC, for example where they learn about the Islamic Golden Age in history in the Autumn term of Year 5, they build on this learning by encountering Ismail al-Jazari who, in 1206, wrote the ‘Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Devices’, using cams mechanisms in the machines he invented.

The curriculum also explicitly engages with the environmental challenges the world currently faces, such as introducing pupils to engineering solutions of Nav Sawhney’s manual washing machine created for people living in refugee camps (inspired by a salad spinner) and the concept of seasonality of ingredients and the different ways of preserving food.

The curriculum has been structured using the very process which the discipline of design itself utilises – (1) investigate and research, (2) design, (3) make, (4) use and evaluate. The ‘sew’ and ‘build’ units use this framework. Using it to structure the children’s learning aims to emphasise the importance of the process. This framework is not followed in the ‘cook’ units, because whilst ‘designing’ food by creating recipes is something which children might do later in life, at primary level, what seems important is that children develop and practise their basic cooking skills.

Whilst teaching DT can seem daunting, with the support of a specified and well-sequenced curriculum, which carefully builds concepts and skills, it should be an exciting prospect. It is certainly one which the children will find fun and really enjoy – and hopefully, as teachers, our passion and enthusiasm might be fuelled too. You might even start to wonder how that thing in the dishwasher whirls round, or how to make the perfect bechamel!