Design and technology is taken seriously at St Clement Danes High School in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire. Not only has the department been given the Ofsted seal of approval (“very good leadership, highly commendable level of commitment and teamwork among teachers”) but students seem very keen on it, too.

And none more so, I suspect, than the Year 10 students who have opted for resistant materials and are involved in a flagship European technology project. Since 1995, the school has been working collaboratively with schools on the Continent in the designing and making of products. Not only are they learning about designing and making within a vibrant department, but they are learning about Europe, about communicating in different languages and they are getting a couple of trips a year to places rather different to Chorleywood.

Under the direction of Martin Clark, the head of the technology faculty, and Mark Nicholson, head of Damp;T, the project has grown from involving just one partner school in Paris to schools in Germany, France and Spain as well. Students from each country visit each other twice a year each year to work together on projects of their own design. The teachers meet an additional time in a different city each year to plan the next project. This year, the students from England have already been to Spain in November and will be going to Germany in May to work on an ongoing project on board games.

The first project, with College Paul Landowski in Paris, involved the two schools working collaboratively to design an egg-timer using electronics. The groups met a couple of times for consultations and to evaluate the final products. The rest of the time they communicated via e-mail and video conferencing.

The year after that, St Clement Danes and the French and German schools each designed an Oxo cube dispenser. The French and Germans had a bit of a problem with the sheer Oxoness of the brief, so they translated it to Knorr, but whatever they called it, the exercise worked. Each school swapped its design with another school for the actual production of the product, so the English made up a French design, the French made a German product and the Germans followed the English specifications.

There is now a Spanish school on board and the four schools’ most recent collaboration, two years in the making, has been a jointly designed pinball-machine board game. Each school had a different part to make: the French designed and made all the electronics for the counting devices, the Germans made the firing mechanisms, the Spanish designed obstacles for the game and the English made return ball mechanisms. When all the components were made, the students met in Paris and put it all together.

Because of this pioneering work, St Clement Danes has been designated the country’s lead school in European technology by the Gatsby Foundation’s Technology Enhancement Programme, which has helped the project by donating all materials and giving guidance. Travelling expenses - paid in Euros - are met by the British Council’s Comenius Fund.

The project, known as TEP Europa, has spawned a small network of schools around the country doing similar joint schemes with schools on the continent. All, including St Clement Danes, use TEP teaching and learning materials and receive advice, if they need it, from Martin Clark.

As a recently designated language college, St Clement Danes will be adding a language dimension to the project this year with the help of its languages department. Martin Clark hopes that the Damp;T department will have access to some of the school’s language assistants (students from abroad who help individuals in MFL classes) to help during visits. Says Martin Clark: “So far, we’ve not been pushing languages as part of the project. But we hope to use them more actively now. As the project goes on, our students are learning that they have to be accurate in their communication in other languages, so integrating a language component into the project makes good sense from every angle.”

And, lest the food technology students feel left out, plans are afoot for Year 8s to do work on European food. Next term, the food technology teachers are going to Germany to make food technology links which, hopefully, will lead to another collaborative project that will not only take more St Clements Danes students out into Europe but bring young Europeans to Chorleywood - and in the process, be teaching these young people important lessons beyond resistant materials.

RESOURCES

The school uses the Technology Enhancement Programme’s Material Selection on its website (www.tep.org.ukindex2.html) and DATA resources (Design and Technology Association, tel: 01789 470007). To find out more about the Comenius Project, contact Matt Cresswell, tel: 020 7389 4620.