Like many children across the country at the end of the Easter term, those in Year 3 at St Jerome Roman Catholic Primary School in Formby, Liverpool, are making bonnets. But these are not the sort of hats that you throw together with paper and glue on a Friday afternoon. St Jerome’s are made according to the Nuffield Primary Solutions pack, a design and technology programme spanning three days which involves children choosing a design and practising the set of skills they will need before making a finished product and evaluating it.

“Tomorrow is the big day when we use all the skills we have learned to make something really good,” Trisha Mackie tells her class on day two of the programme. “Yesterday we learned how to make the right-sized hat for ourselves. Today we’re learning how to print, so we can make our own design for the hat band.”

She produces knives, potato halves and trays of paint (it’s vital to have an assistant for work like this, she says) and the children set to work carving patterns into their potatoes. Half an hour later, a few have paint on their shirts and one has cut her finger slightly, but an enthusiastic and purposeful atmosphere prevails.

“It’s learning through play,” says Trisha. “Spending three days on it means the children’s attention is far more focused, and the impetus is there, because they can see the whole product and the skills leading up to it.”

And the children love it.

“I would like to do design and technology for ever,” says Emily, eight. “What we’re doing shows us how careful you’ve got to be if it doesn’t turn out right. You’ve got to always try your hardest.”

“It’s exciting,” says Francesca, eight. “And it’s nice because if you want to make your hat better on Friday (the final day), you can. You can get models and do it again, when you’ve got some ideas.”

The creative hum isn’t just confined to Year 3. Every class in the school is similarly engaged on a Nuffield three-day project making, among other things, monster calendars, treasure boxes, carrier bags, and giant paper sculpture. There is an assembly planned for the final day when the children will show each other what they have made. The place is a riot of design ideas and little bits of paper, but everywhere you go, engaged, articulate children are keen to explain what they have done so far and what they will do next.

Alison Blair, St Jerome’s design and technology co-ordinator, introduced the Nuffield scheme to the school last September, having been impressed by it at her previous school, which was part of the Nuffield pilot. The staff at St Jerome’s devoted three days in the autumn term to Nuffield design and technology, and were sufficiently pleased with the results to try it again during the following term. “It’s very detailed and easy to follow, and really does get the children thinking about the whole design process,” she says.

The scheme offers a series of 24 design and technology units (on CD-Rom or downloadable from the website), which expand on national curriculum guidance, giving teachers practical step-by-step lesson plans, as well as resource lists, cross-curricular ideas and work sheets. The activities may be spread over a term or concentrated in a week, but Nuffield recommends the three-day immersion. One of the distinctive features of the scheme is that it breaks each unit of work down into small tasks and big tasks, with the mastery of the small tasks essential to the successful completion of the big tasks. The emphasis is placed on the process of designing and making, rather than just on the finished article.

The Nuffield Foundation brought out design and technology programmes for key stage 3 between 1995 and 1997, but its 1995 primary project was temporarily scuppered by the introduction of the labour-intensive literacy and numeracy strategies. “When these strategies came in, primary teachers essentially stopped teaching design and technology because they just couldn’t find the time for it,” says David Barlex, Nuffield project director. “But as schools became good at the literacy and numeracy strategies, headteachers began to say that they wanted to get back to some more creative and practical work.”

Nuffield published the Primary Solutions scheme last year, in conjunction with the Design and Technology Association. Around 1,000 units of work are now being downloaded every week, nationally and internationally.

“I thought three days might be a waste of time for something we could have made in one day,” says Marie Hughes, whose Year 2 class has been experimenting with wheels and making “roly-polies” out of paper plates and loo rolls. “By breaking it up like this, the children are learning more. In the past, I would have just told them how to make something. Now they are making choices and evaluating things for themselves.”

Primary Solutions comes in an A4 wallet with handbook, CD-Rom of the 24 units and a sample unitPrice: pound;9.60 inc VAT and postage from the Design and Technology Association, 16 Wellesbourne House, Walton Road, Wellesbourne, Warks CV35 9JS. Tel: 01789 470007. www.primarydandt.org.uk