Teacher training

The Action:

Train head teachers: include food and nutrition in head teacher training

What’s worked well:

Encouragingly, many teacher training providers are already doing great things to deliver training and improve teacher awareness in healthy eating and the importance of having a whole school approach to food.

Given the diverse and changing landscape of teacher training provision, the Teaching Council has championed the coordination of a wide range of stakeholders to explore and develop the most appropriate methods and resources to train all teachers in the benefits of good school food.

Snippets of success:

Winchester University

Winchester University have been embedding the principles and ethos of The School Food Plan across their different University Teacher Training courses. They have many ambitious plans to continue this work so that all their training teachers are aware of the importance of a great school food culture and their role in supporting this.

Launch of the Broadclyst Teaching Alliance

In September 2015 Broadclyst Community Primary School held a spectacular event to open their multi-purpose dining hall and launch their new teaching alliance. They have taken a whole school approach to the food in school, cooking and training of teachers. As a teaching school they will be piloting different ways to support new teachers to gain an understanding of how to create a great school food culture and act as role models for their pupils.

“You cannot underestimate the role that senior leaders and teachers have in supporting pupils to make healthier choices and improve their readiness to learn. We need to ensure that all teachers are given training to do this to support wider pupil health and wellbeing”.
Jonathan Bishop. Headteacher, Broadclyst Primary school

Food for Life workshop with Teach First

Food for Life delivered workshops to train teachers at the Teach First Summer Institute in Leeds. Many teachers were on a career change path and whilst they were aware of the benefits of a good food culture, were keen to understand more about how to embed it into the curriculum and get support from their senior management team to do so. Feedback from the event was very positive and teachers reported that they now felt more confident about leading and supporting a healthy eating ethos in their school.

Teacher Training Round-table

The School Food Plan coordinated a round-table event with over 30 interested groups from across the teaching, training and academic spheres. Attendees worked to identify what additional provisions are required to ensure that all teachers, at every level of professional development, understand the importance of good food, good food education and the wider impacts on overall health and well-being. The event was extremely successful and all participants left with a commitment to work towards plugging any remaining training gaps.

Public Health England and British Nutrition Foundation

In February and March 2015, Public Health England (PHE) supported the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) to provide national curriculum teacher training events and seminars. This included in the summer the publication of a set of teaching resources ‘Food route: a journey through food’ based on the core Competence framework.

In November 2015, PHE in collaboration with the BNF published knowledge and skills frameworks to support delivery of food teaching in primary and secondary schools. It is intended that these frameworks will be used to review and plan courses for trainee teachers, support teacher performance related development and support best practice.

What’s coming up:

A working group of academics, providers and teachers are developing and piloting training resources to improve the understanding of the benefits of good school food among all teachers at every stage of their career. The materials will be used to raise the priority of this work at a policy level, to ensure that the benefits of a good food culture and wider pupil health and well-being are something that all teachers understand and have the confidence and skills to promote.