Design and Technology is an umbrella subject that acts as a vehicle to contextualise learning that happens across other curriculum areas such as maths, science, art, computing and humanities as well as being an academic subject in its own right. At Hayle Academy our Design and Technology curriculum provides students with the knowledge and skills required to seek further education or training and employment in the rapidly growing creative design and manufacturing sector.  Design and Technology builds students’ resilience, team working skills and their ability to self manage whilst responding to the requirements of a design brief or given context, set against the backdrop of an increasingly technological world.  When pupils leave Hayle Academy they will have learned knowledge and practised skills that will encourage a love of learning and enable them to become lifelong learners and functioning members of society.

In Design and Technology students will develop an understanding of the iterative design process where they explore, create and evaluate a range of outcomes. This reflects our ambition to challenge our students beyond a pure knowledge based curriculum with project learning which lacks creativity.

The aim of our Design and Technology curriculum is to allow students to gain a broad and balanced knowledge base of the key principles of design and technology outlined in the National Curriculum whilst also practising and developing essential practical skills which mainly focus on user centred design and the iterative process.  ‘A problem to solve, not a product to make’.

In Design and Technology our repeat concepts are interleaved and spaced through the planned curriculum to encourage student recall.  Our repeat  concepts are:

• User centered design
• The iterative process
• Mathematical modelling
• CAD
• CAM
• Manufacturing processes