Design & Technology

Following on from my review of the last academic year there have certainly been great developments within the Design and Technology realm. Our new building has raced on since the old Goodfield block was torn down in September 2019 and rising from the dust the new facility will certainly cater well for the students when we move back over from our temporary facility on the netball courts.

We were pleased that our project submissions which make up half of the course in both A Level and GCSE, were completed just prior to the lockdown in March, which gave us the comfort of knowing that the students had done their best and were able to demonstrate fully how creative and hardworking they all are. I know that many were disappointed that they missed the opportunity to display their work in the annual Design and Technology private view exhibition. To this end it is our intention to create a photo book which showcases all the work from the examination groups in lieu of the traditional end of year show.

We have endeavoured to increase the variety of offsite visits we run to further widen our students’ experience in Design and Technology. In November our Sixth Form students visited the Emmanuel Centre in London to participate in the Design in Action seminar, aimed at inspiring young designers to follow a path in design and design manufacture. Further excursions were planned, including a visit to MINI in Oxford and a trip to Engineering in Action which serves a similar purpose to the Design in Action visit. However, a certain COVID-19 put those planned visits on ice and they will be rescheduled for later in the year.

Our lockdown experience within Design and Technology enabled us to vary our usual curriculum and put more emphasis on the designing aspect of the subject. Students were tasked with more design-based activities which culminated with the Product in a Tin competition. All students in Years One to Three were given the task of designing a product which would be compact enough to fit inside a Pringles tube. Students had to select a target audience, design product banding and then manufacture their product using only the resources they had at their disposal at home. Given the large proportion of online work students had done we were aiming at getting them away from their screens. We did resort to bribery and monetised the competition with Amazon vouchers for prizes.

We continue to develop the curriculum and are looking forward to introducing a new textiles project into the Second Year curriculum where students will make a mobile phone ‘Dry Bag’. They will use technical textiles to protect their mobile devices from the elements and we hope that the product will be one they all want to take away with them.

As we look forward to 2021 we are eager to relocate to our new home, due to take place at the end of this year. Excitingly, we are looking forward to inhabiting the new space and welcome the addition of some new equipment, including some more CAM (computer aided manufacture) machinery to enable students to design on computer and have a machine manufacture parts of their product. We will see what 2021 brings but hopefully it will be a full academic year and one which sees the back of the current tumultuous climate.

Mr S Edington