Raising the profile and prominence of Food and Nutrition in our school and our community
By Caroline O’Coy; Head of Design and Technology, Roundwood Park School, Harpenden
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As a passionate food and nutrition teacher and head of D&T, I am always looking for ways to promote my subject, in school and also in the local community, in order to give it the recognition it deserves.
During the last two years, we have made funding bids for the expansion and upgrade of facilities in food and nutrition. This required a strategic plan to ensure I could justify why we needed the funding for our subject area, but also for the wider community, and to try to have more of a whole school impact.
I wanted to share with you some of the ideas we have put in place over the last few years to offer more than just the basic KS3&4 curriculum.
We started to offer the Level 3 diploma in food, science and nutrition at post-16. We are still working to extend numbers but have had positive feedback from this course so far. For this to work, we had to look at extending our out-of-school trips offering, which has been a struggle since COVID. We now visit a farm to look at food provenance, a restaurant tour in a local manor house, and are hoping to join in with “Walk Eat, Talk Eat” in London in the autumn term. We have chefs that visit the school for demonstrations and talks (Animal Aid for a vegan demonstration is highly recommended). We also strived to increase the whole school competitions we offer. We have Ready, Steady, Cook, Staff Bake Off, and, currently, Victoria Sandwich Decorating in honour of the King’s Coronation. We volunteer to cater for whole school events. We cook for the school’s sportsperson’s dinner awards, and put on our own support staff award ceremony called “Unsung Hero”. The use of “Food Teachers Centre” to support both CPD and extra-curricular what? is excellent and their ‘fish for heroes’ program has been fantastic to give our students experience of cooking with sustainable fish.
Our most successful recent extension of the curriculum has been through the year 13 tutorial program. We have embedded a 4-week cooking module to not only reconnect year 13 students with basic cooking skills that they may have long forgotten from year 9, but also to remind them of food poisoning dangers, health and safety and budgeting before they go off to university and live by themselves. I strongly recommend this, and it has had very positive feedback from the students.
We are not sure yet if our bid for a second food room will be successful, but the experience of reflecting and expanding the curriculum has been thoroughly worthwhile. As a teacher, I often find that although the extra trips, competitions and events give us more work on a workload that is already fit to burst, these are the experiences that tend to be the most rewarding and memorable!
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