:: Sustainable Design Award
What's SDA all about?

SDA is a freely available scheme for students and teachers that is intended to help bring issues of sustainability into mainstream designing and making at AS and A2 level

• Exam boards have given greater emphasis to issues of environmental, economic and social sustainability in all parts of their syllabuses in recent years. The scheme offers teachers support in dealing with these issues, especially in relation to product analysis and major projects.

• It can be integrated into students’ coursework for either AS or A2 level.

• It provides an opportunity for students to work on genuine case studies and product analyses within a wide variety of contexts, some northern hemisphere based, others southern, all of which have sustainability issues at their heart.

• It is a scheme to help students explore environmental, economic and social issues in Design & Technology and to help them see that all designing and making involves making moral judgements.

• It is an award available in product design, food technology, textiles technology, graphics and systems and control.

• It has already been undertaken by teachers in over 400 schools in England and Wales whose students take AS and A2 level D&T with any of the four supporting examination boards AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC.

• It is supported by DATA, DFID, EC, National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts (NESTA), Dyson, the Countryside Commission for Wales and the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust.

• Its main partners are Practical Action, the Centre for Alternative Technology, Loughborough University and the Amstel Institute, Amsterdam.
 

How do teachers get involved?