Food: The importance of practical experience

Hello, everyone. Why do we need to make anything in D&T? And in particular, why do we need to cook and use those cooking skills? What’s the relevance of this in the modern world?

Well, we can go and buy ready meals and takeaways. You’re probably doing that tonight, all of you? Perhaps healthy eating used to mean being able to cook for yourself. But why not just go to the supermarket and buy the new pill that keeps our weight down, so we don’t need to worry about healthy eating any more? And isn’t it just a life skill or a lifestyle thing, not really something for education? I can learn all those skills on Instagram, how to cook with all the recipes everyone shows you there.

With the budget squeeze we have at the moment, where food inflation is 17%, school budgets aren’t keeping up, and timetables are being cut, as Tony was saying - skilled staff are hard to come by. It’s easier not to do practical work with classes over 28. I think I’d rather be doing a theory lesson.

Where has this low status of our practical subject, and other practical subjects, come from? The political and social system has long questioned the value of practical subjects. There’s a deeply embedded academic bias. Anything seen as everyday and common sense, anything that historically comes from the hands, from dirty hands maybe, from service, servants, has been seen as low status. We still sit within that system. We have a general education track, and the other track that we seem to have been cossetted into for a lot of our time: preparation for work, for the less able.

Under the current assessment systems, it’s been easier to assess other subjects. Ours are a bit messy and require professionals to moderate what you see in front of you. It's not just marking the written word against a rubric.

And among the GCSE options in front of students now, there are signals of seriousness, coding to parents and young people. Those hidden signals tell them core subjects are valued more, they have very clear pathways, there's something that leads on from that. People don’t choose subjects with no clear pathway to further study. Somebody mentioned it today: inconsistent provision across the country for practical subjects also signals about value, and it reinforces the running-down that we've seen of those resources. Serious subjects are well resourced and consistent in our schools and this is very damaging. It looks less serious to parents when sometimes they go into a school and see a well-equipped food room with modern equipment, and in another there isn’t. How did that come about?

And for food, controversially, I might say, our lifestyle messaging that we’ve turned to, the healthy eating role that teachers have adopted, has been very damaging. If we’re just teaching about ‘eat five a day’, it’s very reductionist, because we’re not embedding it in evidence-based food science, energy balance and food systems. It appear there’s less disciplinary knowledge in the subject. The discipline that is food becomes less apparent.

So what are we to do? How do we change practice and change views? Here are some suggestions on the screen.

Screen:

1. Practical learning – with strong disciplinary language, underpinning practical skills – not just ‘how to’, theory is not an add on.

2. Strengthen rigorous assessment of practical application – impact of AI, rubrics that value accuracy, decision making, applied knowledge, trained moderators.

3. Showcase student excellence – increase subject visibility.

4. Create progression pathways with clear outcomes.

5. Invest in specialist teachers, not just curriculum wording.

I’m lucky enough to remember a time when D&T was the most popular non-core option at GCSE. Once you’d done maths, English and science, we were the next most popular option. For many young people, the doing, the experiential learning, is the bright light in a very boring day. Over the years, I’ve witnessed many wider whole-school curriculum initiatives trying to rescue dull subjects: making learning active, three-part lessons, adaptive teaching, increasing the pacing of lessons. They just needed to step inside a good D&T or food lesson. That’s the bedrock of how we teach.

I taught in Fulham, a couple of miles from here. Pupils weren’t allowed to run in the corridors. It was a school with 9% A*–C. But there was a reason pupils used to run down the corridor to me and say, “What are we doing today, miss? What are we doing today?” They didn’t do that for other lessons.

It goes deeper than kids loving our lessons and enjoying practical subjects. If we’ve learned anything from recent brain science, it’s that hands-on is where learning happens. Some of us will remember the 1970s BBC series by Jacob Bronowski, and his fantastic phrase that I like to return to: “The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.” We’re much hated for being messy and not easy to assess, but this is actually where the learning happens for many of our young people.

Bronowski was a mathematician, scientist and humanist. When you look at his phrases, there’s something our politicians today could learn from. It’s all very well having great thoughts, isn’t it? But unless you apply them for real out in the world, they’re just thoughts.

One final note, on the importance of food and our brains. How did we become the intelligent humans of today? What was our leap forward in evolution? It’s being debated, of course. When we moved to the coast, we caught, cooked and ate fish. That was the massive leap in our brain development from the nutrients in that fish, and the rest is history. We sit here today as the human beings that we are.

The problem is that this is just too obvious. Food is too obvious. It’s around us all the time. And today: crap food, shrinking brains. Quite simple. Again, it’s so everyday. Not that bigger brains mean we’re more intelligent. Men have got bigger brains than women, and I’m not going to let you have that one. We only have to look at Alzheimer’s, dementia and other conditions to know that food is a fuel, and a very important one. And the hands-on part of learning is where the brain develops.

So what do we do within this political system, where we don’t feel particularly valued as food teachers? We continue to work on the ground anyway, one person at a time. That’s part of our practical skills training projects that go on all around the country: one young person at a time, because they deserve better. We can teach food through theory, and D&T through theory. But the great academic traditions of science and history tell us that practical application is transformational on so many levels, and it’s the greatest gift we can give young people.

Thank you.