The Evidence Gap In D&T Curriculum Decisions

D&T curriculum leadership often feels like making consequential calls with half a map. When time is squeezed, pupils disengage, policies shift, and senior leaders want clear rationales, it is easy to end up relying on instinct or borrowed evidence from other subjects. I wanted to pause on a simple but uncomfortable question for primary and secondary Design and Technology subject leads across England, the UK, and beyond: what decisions are you making right now where you genuinely do not have the research evidence you would want to guide you?

I explore what “evidence” means in a research sense, and why D&T can be “rich in practice but thin in evidence” when it comes to demonstrating impact on pupil progress. I share how research summaries, including work shared through the Archer Exchange Network, can clarify what has been studied, while also revealing the mismatch between published studies and the problems teachers are actually trying to solve in schools. That gap matters, because it affects curriculum design, pedagogy choices, and the conversations we have with senior leaders.

Using Key Stage 3 as an example, I look at concerns that the national programmes of study feel underspecified and how unclear progression across Key Stages makes sequencing difficult. If D&T capability depends on deliberate development of knowledge and decision-making over time, then sequencing cannot be left to chance or to a string of projects. I also dig into a crucial distinction: is your issue a one-off local challenge, or a recurring structural problem that should shape the next wave of design and technology education research?

If you want to help move D&T forward, finish this sentence and share it via the survey or online: 

“One curriculum decision I regularly have to make in design and technology without strong evidence to guide me is…” 

If you want to go further, then tell me some more via this form: D&T Curriculum Decision Evidence – Identifying Priority Decision Problems – Fill in form

Subscribe, share with your D&T community, and leave a review so more teachers can join the conversation.

Transcript

Which Decisions Lack Real Evidence

Why D&T Feels Thin On Evidence

A Real Example From England

Sequencing For Capability Over Projects

Recurring Problems Versus One Offs

Share Your Decision Through Survey

Subscribe Share And Get In Touch

Alison Hardy 0:06

You're listening to the Talking DT Podcast. I'm Dr. Alison Hardy, a writer, researcher, and advocate of design and technology education. In each episode, I share views, news, and opinions about DT. I want to try something a little bit different in this episode. I've got a question for Design and Technology Subject Leads, and this is primary and secondary, England and other jurisdictions within the UK and beyond. So let's not kind of think, oh, this isn't for me, it can be, you know, just something to think about. So I want to ask something that I've really been sitting with for quite a while, and when I say a while, I mean probably quite a few years. Um and it's come up in some of the projects I've done, it's been some of the reasons why I've done projects, why I said at the podcast. It's this it's about what decisions are you making right now in DT as a teacher or subject lead where you genuinely don't have the evidence you'd want to make a difference. And here I'm talking about evidence in a research sense. Um, I'm talking about where you know it would maybe ground some of your thinking or give you a structure, or possibly it would also help with conversations with senior leaders in your schools. So it's the research that may have been done in other settings by researchers to investigate or to try out a particular thing. And this isn't about trying to find um, you know, oh, this is what I'd like to think about, or um in a perfect world, this would be happening, and I'd have evidence or research to help me do this. This is about real decisions that you're having to make under real constraints with real pressure coming from above and below. And so above might be your school senior leaders, it might be um what you're picking up in government policy, performance measures, it might be from the pupils, um, disengaging from the subject, not making the progress. I either way, it's it's real things that are happening. So the reason I'm asking this is because design and technology has as long had a reputation for being rich in practice but thin in evidence. Now, that isn't strictly true. One of the challenges can be, and it's not just for design and technology, it happens in other subjects as well, is research that's been done within the space of design and technology that has tested out an intervention. And I don't mean necessarily in the context of a randomized control test, that's not where I'm going here. But it's it's looking beyond teachers' perceptions, student perceptions, student responses. It's actually interrogating. If we've tried this based on whatever, some research, has it made a difference? And how do we know if it's made a difference to pupils' progress? Which I suppose is really where I'm coming from here. I'm talking about things that are to do with what is taught, with the curriculum, the pedagogy, maybe not so much about assessment. So I think I'm kind of possibly losing my own thread of thought, even though I've got some notes unusually for this podcast podcast. I want to find out what your thinking is about these decisions. What are the decisions that you would benefit from some external evidence to try something out? We write research summaries for Archer Exchange, a group of us. And if you're not aware of what the Archer Exchange Network is, I'll put a link in the show notes. Um, it's an online platform for design and technology teachers who are practicing where we're sharing summaries of published research primarily from the field of design and technology. But they only go so far, they can tell you what's been studied. Often it is on a small scale, often it's um maybe only one class, often it's about perceptions, and there's nothing wrong with those. I'm just exploring where there might be a need for you, possibly due to external pressures, for evidence to try something out. Because I think a lot of what we see where things are tried out in schools is based on evidence that isn't design and technology specific, isn't addressing a DT issue. And sometimes that's relevant and helpful, and sometimes it's not. So when we look at published research, those can tell you what's been studied, but they can't always tell you whether anyone studied your problem. So what I want to know is, and I'd like you to do this now, if you can, wherever you're listening. Let's think about over the past year or so. And I think if you're in the UK, this is possibly quite timely. You're in term three, um, not long now till the end of term, it's probably galloping towards you, but you're starting and probably have already begun to make plans for next school year. So this might be an opportunity, or this might be something you want to come back to. So thinking back over the last year or so, have there been any curriculum decisions? Something about sequencing, or how open a project should be, or how you assess or when to introduce a new material or tool, a new procedure, a new idea, a new practice, where you had to make a call and you weren't confident it was the right one. And that's not because you're a good not a good teacher, that's nothing to do with your capability as a teacher, but because the answer genuinely isn't settled yet, or because no one's really looked at it properly, or because the research that exists doesn't quite fit your school's context. Or it might be something, possibly even at this stage, that you're not quite sure how to frame what the problem is that you're trying to resolve. So I'm going to give you an example of the kind of thing I mean. So don't take this as the example, it's just an example. So the curriculum and assessment review in England um drew on evidence from a whole range of people. I think they had about 7,000 responses in total. And this was about the whole curriculum and all of assessment in compulsory education. Okay, so it wasn't just about design and technology, but I do know that many were from DT teachers. And many found that lower secondary school, that's key stage three in England, that's our terminology, that those programs of study, that's the national curriculum, are underspecified. So there isn't enough detail. Um maybe that the language is too vague. And I don't mean that in terms of detail that it has to say more, it might just be that it's it's not clear. So underspecified can mean a number of different things. And buried in that finding is a really significant curriculum decision that every subject lead in primary and secondary is having to make, I think largely on their own, about what does that mean? Okay, so I'm talking about key stage three, but one of the other things that came out of that review that is relevant to primary is that the the progression across key stage one to two to three really wasn't articulated clearly for teachers. So that made sequencing in terms of progression really difficult, but in terms of this under-specification at key stage three, made it really difficult to think about again how deep the knowledge needs to be and what what breadth there needed to be. Because if we take um Kimball and Stable's model of design and technology capability seriously, that idea of the iterative dynamic relationship between thinking and doing in hand and head, and building towards children being able to make autonomous, justified decisions drawing on a bank of knowledge, that's how my thinking is taking it on, and I write about that in the Learning to Teach book, then building towards that kind of capability in pupils requires deliberate sequencing. That goes beyond projects. Projects are a useful pedagogy, but they're not necessarily revealing the sequencing of the development of pupils' knowledge and whether that knowledge is conceptual or procedural, again, as I've written about and talked about previously on the podcast. And also there's a research summary about that in the Archer Exchange Network. You can't just hope it emerges, it takes deliberate planning, and the research evidence from other subjects demonstrates that. But the curriculum, what the teachers were saying who responded to the curriculum assessment review in England were saying was that the curriculum in England doesn't tell you how to do that, it doesn't tell you what knowledge to introduce when because of progression and whether a curriculum policy should do that. And please remember, I'm not giving away any secrets here about what's happening in the England development of a national curriculum. This is just me thinking through one of the issues that teachers I think need to be resolved and/or need some help in resolving, and that came out the evidence I'm drawing on for that is from the review. So teachers having to think about what to introduce when and in what order that is those experiences need to be structured so that pupils are actually developing their capability over time rather than just completing a series of projects, needs some guidance. Now, I don't think a national curriculum is ever going to do that, and that's not the role of a national curriculum, and you can look globally at that, and they they don't really do that. So subject leaders are having to make those sequencing decisions themselves, and they're doing it thoughtfully. You know, I've done it when I was a teacher, you know, I planned it really carefully, you know. So don't get me wrong, I'm not making assumptions here or projecting that people are just kind of randomly putting together projects and curriculum, but they're doing it without an awful lot of evidence to draw on. So that's not a gap in your professional knowledge, that's a gap in the field's professional knowledge. So that's just an example, is around the decisions that you are having to make to think about how do you sequence and structure the curriculum over time, what you're teaching when and why to be able to develop children's DT capability. So once you've got something in mind yourself, that's my example. You can have it if you want, but that's my example. Ask yourself a couple of things. Was it genuinely a choice between some different approaches about how you structured your curriculum or whatever it is that's your decision that you're having to make? Or was it something external, like a policy coming in, or a change in time that you have, or an inspection pressure, something external? Did somebody else make that decision for you effectively? And if you've changed your approach, whether because it's a choice that you had between different approaches that you talked about with your peers, and you've kind of thought this this seems the way I'm gonna uh try. So if you've tried that, if you changed your approach since you had that thinking, what actually shifted your thinking? Was it was it talking to others? Was it evidence from others, or was it instinct? Or was it just what you saw at a workshop when you attended a conference or you saw online? And so then and this is the bit that really matters to me. Thinking about whether this is a one-off problem or whether it keeps coming back. Because if it's a one-off, then you and researchers and others, I mean, you might well be doing research, so let me be careful, I'm not using that as an either-or phrase. They're not going to invest their time, you're not gonna invest your time if it's just a one-off problem in digging around for evidence to help you make a decision. It's about whether it keeps coming back. Is this a recurring thing that you're having to think about and you're still trying to explore what is the evidence that's helping me make this? Have you heard other subject leads in design and technology wrestling with the same thing? Because if it keeps returning, it's probably not a gap in your knowledge, it's a structural problem in the field. Okay, so it's something in design and technology that we have not fully articulated as being a problem. And so that distinction matters a lot to me. Excuse me. There's a difference between a question that research could realistically answer and one where the honest response is this depends so heavily on context, your school, your pupils, your resources, your expertise, that no study is ever going to give you a clean answer. And so part of what I'm trying to do, and there are some people listening to this who will dispute whether evidence from research can ever give you a clean answer. And I'm kind of there a little bit, but I think we can go stronger in a stronger way to helping find evidence, create evidence in terms of doing some research, um, to do that. And so, what I'm trying to do in the research summaries that I'm producing in these conversations is to help you make that distinction clearer. So when the research does exist, you can actually use it, and when it doesn't, we're being honest about that rather than filling the gap with received wisdom dressed up as evidence. And there is nothing wrong with received wisdom, experience as evidence is hugely powerful and significant. But I'm just coming at this from a different angle than we maybe usually talk about in the field of design and technology. So if you're up for it, I'd love to know what your version of this is. What is your decision? So try finishing this sentence somewhere. In your notebook, record it on your phone, in a conversation with a colleague, or in the comments on LinkedIn when I post about this episode. One curriculum decision I regularly have to make in design and technology without strong evidence to guide me is so let me give you that again, this sentence. One curriculum decision I regularly have to make, and you determine what you mean by regularly, have to make in design and technology without strong evidence to guide me, is you don't have to share it with anyone, but if you do want to, I'm really interested. I'm genuinely interested. Because the answers to that question across enough DNT teachers start us start to tell us something that I think is really important, which is about where the research field actually needs to go next. So this is to me a really fundamental question, and I, in my ivory tower, can't answer that. Can't answer that sentence, can't fill out that sentence. My experience as a DNT subject lead is dated. So I need to come to you. And I see teachers wrestling with things, and so I genuinely want to know what are those curriculum decisions that you regularly have to make in design and technology. So these are context-specific to the subject without strong evidence to guide you. So do let me know. There's a number of different ways you can do that. I'm also going to put a link in the show notes and out on social media to a survey. I do love a good survey. Now it's not a research survey, so I don't want your names, I don't want any of your contact details or anything like that. If you choose to say, can I come and chat to you about this, Alison? That's very different. But again, it's not research. I'm just scoping, I'm just trying to find out. So I've created a survey. It could take up to 20 minutes to fill to fill it out, but it might just be useful for you to do it, okay, to explore what some of these things are. These really tough decisions, or sometimes decisions that maybe we gloss over and we think they're easy. So I'll put a link to that in the in the show notes. It'll take about 20 minutes. You can finish it in multiple times. Um, I've got a timer on it, so if you uh don't finish within 20 minutes, it will automatically uh close and send it to me. I don't capture your names, um, but I'd just be really interested. Well, I thought this was going to be a short episode, but it's quite a long one. So I think that gives you an indication about how important this is for me as somebody within design and technology, particularly in the role I have around understanding what's happening on the ground, so that I, in my role and working with others, can help support that and address that and empower teachers to actually make curriculum decisions that are powerful, evidence-based, but also trying and testing them as well as um, you know, sort of just glossing over them or drawing on other subjects because we have a uniqueness to our subject that I think we need to celebrate and explore. I'm Dr. Alison Hardy, and you've been listening to the Talking DT Podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, then do subscribe on whatever platform you use and do consider leaving a review as it does help others find the podcast. I do the podcast because I want to support the DT community in developing their practice, so please do share the podcast with your DT community. If you want to respond to something I've talked about or have an idea for a future episode, then either leave me a voice member via Speakpipe or drop me an email. You can find details about me, the podcast, and how to connect with me on my website, dralisonhardy.com. Also, if you want to support the podcast financially, you can become a patron. Links to Speakpipe Patreon and my website are in the show notes. Thanks for listening.