Health and Wellbeing

In the autumn edition of Headteacher Update, you may have read my article describing the school food journey that has revolutionised the quality of meals and so much more at The Grove Primary School.

In education, when you start a journey such as this you aim for an initial destination, but usually find that this becomes nothing more than a staging post on a longer journey with multiple benefits!

As described in my article, we work with the Chefs in Schools initiative and have our own chef, Marco Pilloni. Together we have transformed our lunchtime experience and the children’s relationship with food in school.

I will let you read that article in your own time but suffice to say that apart from Marco cooking our meals, Chefs in Schools also advocates the chef becoming a “food educator” for the children and this has led to the development of a progressive food curriculum for our pupils. In this article I want to briefly discuss this part of our journey.

Welcome arrival: Acclaimed chef Marco Pilloni arrived at The Grove Primary School via the Chefs in Schools initiative (image: supplied)

Our food curriculum

We have always taught the children how to cook within our design technology curriculum and we thought it was progressive in terms of starting with the easier recipes in EYFS and moving up to the children being able to create meals by the time they are in year 6.

However, when I stopped to pause, look at the recipes, and think about what happens with cooking when our teenagers are at secondary school (often not the most enlightening experience unless they sign up for GCSE), I considered that perhaps we were not being ambitious enough.

I can cook. My sister can cook. We love to share recipes, but we can whole-heartedly tell you that this is not down to our mother, as remarkable and talented as she was. She really was a reluctant and uninspiring disher-up of the most filling and easy-to-make meals for our family of seven (with three very hungry boys!).

My sister and I learnt to cook from our home economics teacher at Valentines Comprehensive High School in Ilford. Mrs Carrick definitely was the person who taught my sister and me how to cook (our brothers went to a different boys’ only school). I in turn have taught my own children how to cook. However, what happens if you don’t have a Mrs Carrick or a parent who can cook? That is the thought that stuck in my head when I revisited our food curriculum.

I asked myself: what if every child who left our school at age 11 had all the basics covered and were able to follow almost any recipe in any cookbook? Would that change what the children of the future would eat? It just might.

Designing the curriculum

I started with a lot of research about core cooking skills and then added to this my own thoughts about what basic skills a person would need in order to follow any recipe (within reason – cordon-bleu cooking can come later). We considered the vocabulary they would need to understand and what ingredients they would need to have experienced in creating food for the table. We thought it should include how to:

• Measure ingredients
• Follow a recipe
• Cook with eggs
• Make sauces and dressings
• Make dough
• Chop and slice
• Bake and grill, boil and fry
• Make soups
• Understand and use common cooking terminology and vocabulary

I started with EYFS and divided the curriculum plan into equipment and utensils, cutting skills, food preparation skills, cooking skills, and recipe suggestions that would cover all of these – as well as what vocabulary to learn of course.

The curriculum, which you can download from our school website or by clicking the button above, states: “As part of their work with food, pupils should be taught how to cook and apply the principles of nutrition and healthy eating. Instilling a love of cooking in pupils will also open a door to one of the great expressions of human creativity. Learning how to cook is a crucial life skill that enables pupils to feed themselves and others affordably and well, now and in later life.”

The curriculum describes that in key stage 1, pupils should be taught to “use the basic principles of a healthy and varied diet to prepare dishes with elementary cooking skills” and “understand where food comes from”. In key stage 2, meanwhile, pupils need to:

• Understand and apply the principles of a healthy and varied diet.
• Prepare and cook a variety of predominantly savoury dishes using a range of cooking techniques.
• Understand seasonality and know where and how a variety of ingredients are grown, reared, caught, and processed.

Other aspects, such as weighing and measuring, following or creating recipes to a brief, can come under other curriculum subjects (e.g. maths, literacy, design technology).

I also look carefully at recipes where we could make use of Marco’s skills to teach trickier things like chopping and slicing, and also which skills might be straight-forward enough for a class teacher to take on.

And finally, the curriculum focuses on mixed age classes and is designed accordingly in three stages: years 1 and 2, years 3 and 4, and years 5 and 6.

This allows us to really embed and revisit skills and vocabulary across two years before moving onto the next stage of the curriculum.

Final thoughts

I expect I have missed out some aspects from our curriculum and I keep thinking of things when cooking myself and adding it onto the curriculum!

However, if the children can leave our school having developed all these fundamental skills, no matter what their background or economic situation, then we will have surely improved their health and wellbeing and their relationship with food for the better.

• Hilary Priest is headteacher at The Grove Primary School in Totnes.

Further information & resources

• For more information on the vision for school food at The Grove School, including a download of its Progressive Food Curriculum go to http://www.the-grove-primary.devon.sch.uk/web/school_meals/138106