Design and technology is crucial to the national economy and to individual employment prospects. This work shows how design and technology has come to occupy a new and central place in the school curriculum. The author highlights the higher status and new identity now accorded to technology. He explores this new identity, its origins, its manifestations in classroom practice, and its possible futures. He pays particular attention to its role in the national curriculum, to assessment, to gender and race issues, and to management, and includes two entirely new chapters on the training of design and technology teachers and on design and technology in classroom practice.