Food for Life Partnership

• Setting up a Dedicated Cooking Room
• Leadership
• Cooking
• Growing
• Farm Links
• Food Quality and Provenance
• Food Culture and Community Involvement
• People profiles

Setting up a Dedicated Cooking Room

Before the Cooking Bus visit, I believed that setting up a dedicated cooking classroom in school would be prohibitive, both in terms of cost and space. I imagined rows upon rows about sinks, cupboards, fridges and cookers.

We now have a fantastic resource, separate from our normal classroom space enabling us to have cooking throughout the day with the goal that each one of our 500 pupils will get 12 hours of cookery teaching throughout the school year.

It was very simple to set up, all you need is a dedicated space or a room. The Cooking Bus visit was a real inspiration as it showed us what a modern ideal cookery room could look like; from there it was simple to replicate.

The key thing that we noted was that you needed wipe down tables. We spotted some in IKEA which were cheaper than in the school catalogue – they give the cookery room a different feel from a classroom. We wanted it to be modern, hygienic and to set the tone of a different learning environment.

We also worried about having rows of sinks for washing hands, but we now know that a washing up bowl under each table with some anti-bacterial hand wash is just as good. The other thing we realized was how to set up a cooking lesson in an orderly way, with enough small dishes for ingredients etc.

In terms of cost, the money came from the PTA and some of our capital money, and was less than £3,000. The most expensive element was the laminate flooring costing £1,500. The range of cupboards was sourced from our local DIY superstore, and we fitted locks to some of the cupboards to keep knives safe. We have one fridge freezer, a sink, a couple of £135 mini ovens – which the Isle of Wight Trust helped us with. The tables were a bargain at £21 each and the height varies – and there were some smaller ones which were £10 each. We can get a whole class in there, with 4 around a table, but we prefer to work with half a class at a time.

We have had brilliant response from parent helpers coming into help run classes and help with washing up as it’s something that parents feel that they can do and for some more fun than listening to children read. The children regard cookery lessons as a treat – most of them say it’s their favourite lesson. They are cooking a range of dishes sourced from the Cooking Bus and some that link into the curriculum, including Maths, D&T, History and English. We keep a detailed log of what children have made and key skills learnt throughout their time in the cookery lessons.

If we were doing it again we would not do anything different. We had thought we might need stools for the children, but it’s actually better not having any as they would just get in the way. The only other change is we are now putting a lock on the classroom door – just to keep our youngest children safe when the classroom is not in use.