Our Partnership Schools: Lessons learned – Professional chef to teacher

After years working in professional restaurant kitchens, I always enjoyed talking to customers and front-of-house staff about the food, ingredients, and dishes we were preparing. But when I started teaching in schools, I found it even more inspiring to see learners of all ages tasting, cooking, and experimenting with different ingredients and techniques for the first time. Watching a student make their first homemade pasta sauce or successfully whip up their first meringue—those are the moments that give you goosebumps.

How did your first few lessons go?

Lessons were much harder than professional kitchens! Managing children all chopping and cooking a stir-fry at the same time meant handling lots of different scenarios all at once. In a professional kitchen, I only had to think about myself, my team, and the next few orders. In a classroom, I had students who listened carefully, some who didn’t, some trying their best, and others deciding they didn’t like red pepper and simply throwing it in the bin. “Eyes in the back of your head” doesn’t quite cover it! But when they left the lesson proud of what they’d made—or when a parent or carer popped in the next day to say how much they enjoyed their child’s home-cooked meal—those moments made it all worthwhile.

What were the three main challenges you had to overcome?

1. Timings – What I thought would take a set amount of time often took much longer (or sometimes not long enough). Different age groups work at different paces, and you don’t want them standing around waiting while something cooks—but you also don’t want the lesson to run over by 20 minutes, particularly when the curriculum is so busy. Learning to pace lessons properly was my first big challenge.
2. Skill levels – Children in a class have a huge range of experience, and expertise, in cooking. I had to ensure we started with the fundamentals while still giving them something exciting and delicious to take home at the end of the lesson.
3. Recipe complexity – It’s easy to simplify recipes too much, but at some point, a carrot cake without carrots isn’t a carrot cake. Similarly, leaving out a pinch of cinnamon or a squeeze of lemon might save time or money, but it’s those little details that are key to what cooking is all about. There’s a growing pressure to cut down on ingredients for cost reasons, but I’d always prefer students to make a smaller portion of a fully flavoured dish rather than removing the elements that make it special (and tasty!). Too often, we focus on quick and easy meals, but young people gain so much from exploring different flavours and techniques.

How did you adapt your teaching as you became more experienced?

Over time, I became much more confident in classroom management. I learned to identify which students needed extra support and which could work independently, and I became better at balancing practical skills with theory. My ability to demonstrate techniques clearly improved, and I made sure that every lesson incorporated learning through doing, rather than separating theory from practice.

What surprised you most about teaching cookery?

The sheer joy of seeing children tasting, eating, and enjoying themselves every day. We learn so many things at school that we never use again, but cooking is a lifelong skill. I loved knowing that at some point in the future, a student might make that stir-fry again, feel confident to make themselves a nutritious fruit breakfast pot before leaving for school,  or cook something special for their family or friends.

What advice would you give about teaching cookery for the first time?

Take a deep breath and start with the basics. Think of it like building up a recipe—master the fundamentals of classroom management, and everything else will follow. Don’t worry too much about a dish sounding ‘too simple’—even something like a panzanella salad can lead to discussions about knife skills, seasoning, food provenance, and nutrition. The key is to keep lessons engaging and, most importantly, make sure that what students cook is truly delicious. If they leave with a sense of pride and the confidence to cook again at home, that’s the real success.

Engaging demonstrations made a huge difference in my lessons. Getting students to taste ingredients at different stages—under seasoned vs. over seasoned, underripe vs. overripe, dense vs. well-risen bread—helped them understand food in a much deeper way.

I firmly believe in teaching theory through practical experience rather than just from a whiteboard. Children already spend so much of their day staring at screens and notes; I wanted cookery lessons to be a break from that—something hands-on, immersive, and, above all, enjoyable.

We eat three times a day—it still surprises me that cookery isn’t considered an essential part of education for everyone.