From CDT to digital: rethinking our D&T department

It is really good to be here. Normally at this time of day I’m teaching 20 teenage boys, so the fact that it doesn’t stink of Lynx in here and you’re not burping and farting means you’re already doing better than them.

There we go. Right, so I’ve got five minutes to talk about this image. This is one of our rooms at school, and it tells a story I want to discuss. On the left-hand side is what I’d consider old-school, traditional D&T. On the right-hand side is the direction we’ve gone in, moving away from craft, design and technology. I don’t want to offend anyone. This is just our view of how things have gone, and it works for us. There’s a time and a place for craft, and I get that. This is just showing one other option.

A little bit of context, so you don’t think we can do this because we’re an independent school with a huge amount of money. We’re not selective. We’re part of a multi-academy trust, and we’re an upper school, so we don’t get the boys until Year 9. When they come to us, their backgrounds aren’t great. They’ve not had a great experience of design and technology, so we treat them as if we’re starting from scratch. We do end up with a really good uptake at GCSE, with four groups in Years 10 and 11, and we get a group of roughly 12 or 13 in Years 12 and 13.

Here are a couple of facts that might open your eyes a little as to why we’ve gone down this route. In 2026, this year, our budget was £4,500 to cover everything from Year 9 all the way through to the sixth form. When I first started, the department budget was £13,000, so you can see that’s a massive drop. There are only two of us in our department now. When I started, there were seven of us in total. That paints a picture of how things have gone over the last 20 years.

This paints it a bit more. It’s just my career, and it’s very much a career of two halves. At the school where I started, the head of department had been there, as I said, for a really long time. It was very old school. The projects were all very similar, based on woodwork, metalwork and so on. Projects were very large, like coffee tables. We had lots of dedicated workshop spaces, a drawing room and an electronics lab. The only disappointment was that we had very, very limited IT facilities.

In 2012, our head of department left, and things started to change, as you can see over here. We got our first 3D printer in 2012. We were one of the first 20 schools in the country to get 3D printers, and we grew from there. Gradually we phased out the material-specific rooms, and we now have multi-purpose rooms. I think one of the earlier speakers talked about how more and more D&T rooms are going multi-purpose. We now have 12 3D printers: some old, some new, some borrowed, some stolen. *laughter* We have a laser cutter, as most departments do, and 50 PCs running 2D Design and Fusion 360. There’s a huge emphasis on critical thinking, problem solving, designing for users and clients, and learning through iteration. I think that’s really, really important, and I’ll touch on it in a second.

So, just two slides: one of where we were and one of where we are now.

This is what I remember from school as a kid. It was called CDT, and unfortunately I believe a lot of schools are still delivering it this way. I think the subject, taught like this, probably has a bit of an identity problem. At open evenings and school tours, parents come in and ask, “Do you do woodwork and metalwork?” That’s maybe not what I’d like to entertain. The projects were large-scale and very boxy: you’re going to design a box, you’re going to design a table. The emphasis was just on the craft of the product, and at GCSE that maybe gets you 20 marks.

So for us, the issues were these. It was very expensive. We couldn’t store any of it, and our department was shrinking in size. It was very, very time-consuming. There were a lot of health and safety issues linked to these projects. And often the teacher was working harder than the student. I don’t think that’s a good situation to be in. The emphasis should be on the kids working a lot harder than we are. We’re there to facilitate, to guide and to give them skills.

The other issue we found with those, was iteration. I think we learn a lot through development. The iteration process, learning through doing, evaluating and testing, is really, really important. If all our focus is on one end piece, where does that development come from? We also felt there was a lack of creativity. Okay, you could have a different surface on top, but essentially all the projects were the same. And the kind of students we send out into the real world aren’t going to be carpenters or metalworkers. They’re going to work for companies and design consultancies, and go on to industrial design courses and so on.

So we changed it a little, and this is what we’re into now. Some people would completely disagree with this, and that’s absolutely fine. We do really well at it, and the boys absolutely love it. We solve real problems for real people. The students completely buy into it. They often choose the projects with their clients, so it’s something they’re passionate about. The big red writing there is the most important part for us: learning through failure.

They’re not limited by machinery. We don’t have queues at the bandsaws or lathes, so we don’t get those log-jams. Many students have this CAD software at home, and many invest in 3D printers at home. The outcomes are very, very creative. Little or no storage space is needed. There’s reduced risk. (I’m just flying through these now). There are reduced costs, which is very important considering we have no budget. A roll of filament is 25 quid, something like that. The quality of the outcomes is really high, and the number of iterations they can show they’ve learned from is huge.

There’s a little QR code there. You’re more than welcome to scan it, and it will show you one of these projects and its outcome. Thank you very much.