Join us for our open evening at Leiths on Thursday, 16 July 2026, 6.30–8.30pm, and discover how the Culinary Diploma can launch your career in food.
Join us for our open evening at Leiths on Thursday, 16 July 2026, 6.30–8.30pm, and discover how the Culinary Diploma can launch your career in food.
We always cook from scratch using fresh, seasonal ingredients. From simple cookery to advanced culinary skills, we always follow this approach.
We teach using applied teaching methods encouraging students to learn, cook, taste and improve.
We believe learning to cook from scratch is a fundamental life skill that should be accessible for all.
We offer a complete culinary curriculum and constantly look forwards to enhance and update our schemes of work.
We have a track record of reliability, credibility, and professionalism earned through nearly 50 years of providing the highest quality of food education. Students can rely on us to help them achieve their full culinary aims and ambitions.
We foster exceptional results for our students with highly-skilled teaching staff and tried and tested industry-leading teaching methods.
Prue Leith was a visionary. In 1975, when she founded Leiths School of Food and Wine alongside Caroline Waldegrave, spaghetti bolognese seemed exotic and ready meals were increasing in popularity.
But Prue believed in teaching students to cook fresh, seasonal ingredients from scratch using simple methods and recipes that worked.
This way of teaching has proved to be extremely effective. Tens of thousands of students have been trained in the Leiths way.
Our ethos of cooking simple ingredients from scratch has not changed but the world we live in has. With bold changes to our provision, Leiths Education, our new identity, has been restructured to share our tried and tested resources and teaching methods with the many and not the few.
Our highly-esteemed flagship Culinary Diploma will remain at our School London. But as the cookery education specialists, we have adopted a national view of culinary education. To help break down the barriers to food education, we have developed a complete pathway of cookery teaching from aged five right through to food and nutrition teacher training.
The ability to cook affordable and nutritious food is an essential life skill. However, many primary and secondary school children are missing out on cooking lessons. Leiths Education’s new partnership school programme is offering an accessible solution to this growing problem.
We have fully-costed and easy to use packages to enable students aged five to eighteen to learn the essential life skill of how to turn simple, fresh ingredients into tasty nutritious food. Students as young as five will learn new skills such as how to make quesadillas, bruschetta or overnight oats in the space of a 50 minute lesson. Plus, our KS1 & KS2 full cookery programme of 32 lessons is free to all non-fee-paying pre-school and primary age children in the UK.
We have created an affordable and accessible approach to practical cookery for teachers and students in schools of any shape or size. Your school does not need high-tech cookery facilities. In fact, with a few basic pieces of cooking equipment and a classroom or school hall we can get your students cooking, smelling, tasting and smiling in no time.
Students grow in independence through the joy of cooking lessons and engagement is high due to the reward of a delicious meal or tasty treat in just one session. Put simply, taking home something you’ve cooked from scratch for your family to share is a life-enhancing experience.
In order to facilitate the need for specialist cookery teachers in schools, we have gone one step further to create two unique food teacher training qualifications to complete the circle of culinary education.
We have developed the first ever PGCE in Food and Nutrition in partnership with the University of Roehampton. We have also developed a Level 7 Advanced Certificate of Food Education to bring experienced professionals such as chefs and teaching assistants into the food teaching profession. This will streamline the process of becoming a food educator thus feeding into the ecosystem of increased cooking confidence in children across the country.
Leiths Education will connect its impressive heritage with the country’s current food education landscape. With years of experience in our back pocket, Leiths Education has the recipe to improve cookery skills across the country. Whether it be in a primary school classroom, on our flagship Culinary Diploma or on the first ever national Food and Nutrition PGCE, we would be delighted to share it with you.
