The Design and Technology (D&T) department is based in the ground floor of the purpose-built David Holmes Building. It is a spacious multi-media workshop, providing a full range of facilities for the delivery of all aspects of the D&T curriculum.

Department Aims

• To establish a safe learning environment that is conducive to learning is stimulating, imaginative and where students feel supported and secure.
• To link to many different curriculum areas in order to develop a set of transferable skills they can enjoy in school and use in their future working lives.
• To enable students to combine their designing and making skills with knowledge and understanding, in order to design, make, analyse and evaluate products of high quality.

Design and Technology lessons focus on pupils solving real-world problems by designing and making, using fabrics, cards and boards, woods, metals, polymers (or ‘plastics’), mechanical and electronic components.

D&T is taught from Upper Juniors to Year 11. The majority of work carried out in lessons is practical in nature allowing pupils to gain an understanding of the properties of materials and tools to design intelligently. Although pupils may focus on the quality of their finished outcome, it is the learning which takes place en-route which is most important.

Pupils use a wide range of hand tools, machine tools, power tools, and CNC equipment during lessons and get to experience new and innovative ways to approach problems using different pieces of equipment.

Tasks are differentiated (often self-differentiated by pupils) to best suit their strengths and interests. Pupils investigate new technologies including CAD design from form 1 onwards and are encouraged to develop these cross-curricular skills further if they choose to take D&T as a GCSE option

Design work is often collaborative in nature and pupils are encouraged to analyse, evaluate, and test their work in the Iterative Design Process.