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SPOTLIGHT ON: Cooking in the Curriculum (Action 1)

20 Sep 2013

For the first time ever, practical cookery is compulsory in the the new national curriculum for children up to Year 9. The requirement for cookery lessons will come into effect in 2014.

The key now is to make sure the implementation is good. Obviously, teachers need the resources to teach the subject well. That means providing equipment and help with lesson planning.

As part of the School Food Plan, many organisations are working to provide support for schools without a teaching kitchen. It’s still possible to teach cooking – and many already do – using electric hotplates and other temporary equipment, or creating foodstuffs that can be prepared in the classroom and then finished off at home. The curriculum has been carefully worded to allow for this sort of lesson.

For example, the Times Educational Supplement (TES) is supporting this effort to make sure teachers get the help they need with planning lessons and brushing up their own cooking skills. The TES website – the UK’s most accessed resource for teachers – is developing a section dedicated to cooking lessons. It will showcase brilliant lesson plans and wider curricula from different schools, and it will list resources which schools can use to support their teaching efforts.

The site will also will also give advice on issues such as class size (most of the best schools teach cooking in groups of 18 or fewer), lesson timing (it may be necessary to extend cooking lessons to slightly over an hour), and funding (a number of schools provide ingredients free of charge, while in others the school canteen buys the ingredients in bulk and charges parents for them, thus considerably reducing the cost of lessons).

While this curriculum support resource is being developed, here are a few organisations which have already developed guidance for cookery lessons:

  • The Children’s Food Trust
  • Chefs Adopt a School programme
  • The Jamie Oliver Foundation
  • And many more

Note: Mention of these resources does not entail an endorsement but rather signposting for teachers to the wealth of materials already available – it is up to schools to decide for themselves which materials are best suited to their particular context.

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