Maidenhall Primary School

Half Day Bespoke INSET on Primary Planning

Maidenhall Primary School, Luton is a mainstream, state funded junior school for mixed pupils in Luton. Currently it has approximately 700 pupils. Maidenhall Primary is a member of the D&T Association and reached out for some bespoke training for Primary D&T. After an initial discussion on their training objectives, Ryan Ball Director of Education at the Design & Technology Association held a half day INSET training session for 24 KS1 and KS2 teachers.

The school were fairly new to their D&T journey as it had lost the prominence and position in the curriculum over a number of years. Whilst they had a curriculum written by the school they were unsure if it was going to have the impact and quality they desired.

Objective

Review and develop teachers’ knowledge on delivering an effective D&T lesson.

Training

The training session was held onsite at Maidenhall Primary School. Their bespoke INSET consisted of a half-day session split into looking at developing an inspirational curriculum and the core components to delivering effective D&T, followed by a practical session whereby all teachers learnt how to code a crumble microcontroller (kindly supplied by Redfern Electronics) and  micro:bit and how these can be implemented into their D&T curriculum.

To ensure the safety of everyone present and maintain social distancing, Ryan used a camera supplied by one of our D&T Corporate Members, Hue Cameras, to project the intricate connections of crumble onto a big screen. 

Review

Feedback from the half day training session has been extremely positive, the training established the basic fundamental steps needed to teach an effective and purposeful D&T lesson. Indeed a lot of the staff are reviewing planning and changing outcomes to meet the needs of pupils. Moving forward, the next steps would be to implement more computer technology into their D&T lessons.

Jahanara says, "All staff were inspired and as a D&T lead I feel that we are now all on the same level of understanding… I feel the staff have gained more self assurance".