Our Partnership Schools: Innovative solutions for teaching practical cookery in schools

Few would argue against the need for all children to learn how to cook from scratch. But many children and adults now lack the knowledge and skills to enable them to turn basic raw ingredients into wholesome, nourishing meals.

In the 1980s, I had weekly double practical cookery lessons and learnt everything from fruit and vegetable prep to how to make a roux sauce, shortcrust pastry and even how to joint a chicken. Alongside this, I learnt about food hygiene, basic nutrition and budgeting. Consequently, I left school with all the foundational skills required to know how to turn fresh ingredients into affordable home-cooked meals to feed myself, my friends and, in time, my family.

Food education is an important subject in itself, but it also provides a wealth of transferable skills: organisation and timekeeping; being prepared and ready to work independently and as part of a team; hygiene and cleanliness; as well as problem-solving and resilience. Delivered well, practical food lessons can be extremely powerful – very few subjects can deliver a positive, tangible (and nutritious) outcome in under an hour, with the knock-on effect of improvements to engagement, attendance and confidence across other areas of the curriculum. But the subject also has a huge role to play in addressing many wider issues like obesity, with almost a quarter of 10 to 11-year-olds described as obese. However, there are a variety of challenges to providing food education in schools.

Practical food education can be costly to deliver and it can be challenging to manage lessons within the typical 50-minute timetabled lesson. However, there are strategies and approaches that can help. We need new, innovative thinking to enable more children to benefit from hands-on practical food lessons. Delicious recipes can be prepared in a school hall or classroom space with as little as a bowl of hot soapy water, a simple kit of equipment from the supermarket stored in a plastic box between lessons and a plug-in induction hob. Pairing or grouping students reduces the amount of equipment required and, with students working together on recipes, means they can be completed within a 50-minute timeframe.

Schools can also ensure food education is inclusive and hygienic by providing ingredients that have been bought in bulk for an entire year group, such as 10kg of mince or a jar of cinnamon to be used by a whole class. With this approach, the cost of ingredients can drop as low as 30 or 40 pence per student.

We also need more teachers and we need to offer new routes into food education as many of today’s teachers will not have experienced practical cookery lessons themselves whilst at school.

Leiths Education is proud to be working with the University of Roehampton on this new qualification. We’re also pleased to be supporting them with the first regional PGCE in Food and Nutrition. High quality food education is valuable in and of itself, but it is a subject that gives much more to young people.

Maria Dunbar taught food education for many years and is now CEO of Leiths Education. Read her full article in Teach Secondary on page 50-51 here.