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

I have argued for years, often in rooms where it was not the fashionable thing to say, that practical skills deserve the same respect as academic ones. Reading Andy Burnham in The Times this week, I found our new Prime Minister making exactly that case.

He wrote about a Britain that learns to value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap. Beside the two of them, though he did not say so himself, belongs the chef’s hat. For all that a career in food is still treated as the fallback for children who did not take to written exams or ‘traditional academic subjects’, it is a career that requires real skill, judgement and creativity, and it offers a future no machine or AI platform can automate away. The message that matters, as he put it, is the one we send our children: that there is no single future worth preparing them for but many, and that each and every one of them deserves the same respect.

That message cannot wait for a careers talk at sixteen. It has to start early, and for me it has to start with food. Of all the practical skills a child picks up, cooking is among the first, and among the most powerful. Peeling a carrot, grating cheese or cracking an egg for the very first time builds confidence, health and independence that stay with them for life.

Almost everyone now agrees that children should learn to cook. That agreement is the easy part. The hard part, and the one I spent years navigating as a cookery teacher, is not whether children should cook but how you make it happen in a real school with real pupils: how you find room in a timetable that is already full, money in a budget that is already stretched, and confidence in staff who may never have cooked in front of a class. The how is where this is won or lost.

So we built the answer to it. Starting with thirty-two lessons across Key Stages 1 and 2, each one taught on video by our own chefs, each one accompanied with the lesson plans, the recipes and the shopping lists a busy teacher needs, and all of it free to every non-fee-paying school in the country. The barrier was never willingness. It was time, cost and confidence, and each one of those is a barrier we have broken down. 

Because we know what happens when we do. In the largest study of its kind, our Primary School Cookery Pilot, more than four in five of the children improved their practical cookery skills, while their teachers watched confidence, concentration and curiosity grow across the curriculum in pupils they thought they already knew.

And primary is only where our pathway begins. From a child’s very first lesson in primary school, through secondary school, further and higher education, all the way to training the teachers who will one day deliver it, Leiths offers practical cookery programmes and qualifications as a single unbroken learning journey. Whichever future a young person walks towards, we want the skill, and the confidence and belief that their talents and contribution to society matters, supporting them right from the start.

The earlier we show children that their hands, their ideas and their skills have real worth, the more of them grow up believing they were always meant to be part of what comes next.

None of this is a change that government or business can make alone. We have made the case in the House of Lords and in classrooms across the country, and wherever this government is ready to deliver it, Leiths will be a willing private sector partner to ensure our young generations learn the cookery skills they need for life and the culinary skills to enable them to build our culinary industries of the future.