“High-quality design and technology education makes an essential contribution to the creativity, culture, wealth and well-being of a nation.”
The National Curriculum
“Design is thinking made visual.”
Saul Bass (Graphic Designer)
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. It’s how it works.”
Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple)
Helping Each Child to Flourish
Design and technology is an exciting and inspiring subject that we love to teach at Heworth CE Primary School. We offer our children the opportunity to acquire valuable practical skills and to put their creativity and imagination to good use. Our wide-ranging curriculum encompasses structures, mechanisms, electrical systems, food technology and textiles. Our aim is to provide our children with relevant, engaging and challenging projects that have been developed with an emphasis upon use and purpose. Through these practical projects, we provide opportunities for all our children to develop the key skills of researching, designing, making, evaluating and improving. Our children are encouraged to experiment and to take risks within a safe environment, and when things go wrong – we learn from them! Our goal is to instil in each child a belief that they can shape the designs of the future.
What does design and technology looks like at Heworth CE Primary School?
- Enthusiastic children learning and developing practical and relevant life skills
- Topic inspired, challenging projects set within a range of contexts
- Our children applying their understanding and skills from other subject areas including maths, science, computing and art
- Our children solving real and practical problems, using their growing technical knowledge and understanding
- Children testing, evaluating and improving their designs and those of others
How do our values shine through in design and technology?

Trust
Our children have to trust in their own ideas and abilities and in those of their team members, as they work together to acquire new skills, take risks, evaluate, work through problems, and celebrate success.

Compassion
Our children show compassion by empathetically assessing the needs and wants of others, whilst solving real life problems.
How do children flourish in design and technology at Heworth CE Primary School?
- Our children delight in capturing their creative ideas and making them reality
- As they make steady progress, our children will grow in confidence and take pride in their developing technical understanding and practical abilities
- Through studying designers of the past, experimentation, trial and error and thoughtful, objective evaluation, our children learn about the rewards that can result from resilience and determination.
- Inspired by their experiences of design and technology, our children may pursue the subject either though further study or as a future career.