Diploma Life

Congratulations to our Diploma graduates of 2026!

The Leiths Culinary Diploma class of 2026 graduated in a ceremony that saw the school award its first ever Honorary Culinary Diploma and name a Student of the Year who had swapped two decades in the corporate world for a year in the kitchen.

Leiths backs Andy Burnham’s push on vocational skills and CEO Maria Dunbar says it has to start with cooking

Maria Dunbar, CEO of Leiths Education, argues that the chef’s hat belongs beside the hard hat and the graduation cap. Writing in response to the Prime Minister’s case for valuing practical skills as much as academic ones, she makes the point that a career in food is still too often treated as the fallback for children who did not take to written exams, when it is anything but. Almost everyone now agrees children should learn to cook, she says. The hard part is how you make it happen, and that is, Maria argues, where this is won or lost.

Katya Katalinic suffered from a stroke aged eighteen and was not expected to survive. Two years later, she started the Leiths Culinary Diploma.

‘I didn’t do Leiths because of my stroke. I did it for myself.’

Aged eighteen, Katya Katalinic had a stroke in Cape Town and woke from a six-week coma with no memory of her own life. This month she finished the Culinary Diploma. She talks to us about how learning to cook is what’s given her a future back.

Rebecca Swan retraining as a food teacher via the Leiths Level 7 Advanced Certificate in Food Education

I did the Leiths Culinary Diploma in the nineties. Now, I’ve retrained as a food teacher.

Rebecca Swan trained as a chef at Leiths in the nineties, raised four children and built two businesses along the way, including a cake company she still runs today. Here, she tells us why she returned to Leiths to train as a food teacher, and the path it has opened to a PGCE and a career in teaching.

The graduate: Laoise Casey

Laoise Casey changed careers in her thirties, training at Leiths before a weekly Evening Standard column, a run of restaurant kitchens and a development role at Marks and Spencer. She is now head of food at the recipe platform Plate Up.

The Leiths Diploma graduates working at Mindful Chef

Four Leiths Culinary Diploma graduates have found their way to Mindful Chef. Head of food Jesse Kempner and development chef Celia Price explain why its customers still love to cook, and how the company clears the way for them to enjoy it.

The graduate: Cate Walton

Cate Walton trained at Leiths and has spent twelve years writing recipes and styling food for titles including Sainsbury’s Magazine, Good Food and Olive. She talks about private cheffing, the consistency she learned on a ski season and what makes a recipe worth returning to.

How I lead a team of chefs in Davos just after graduating from Leiths

Leiths graduate Ellie Spicer tells us how she thought she had bit off more than she could chew when she went to work as a chef at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But, with her training under her belt and a huge amount of determination, she was able to lead her team to success.