Dear Head Teacher
How to Teach Cooking In Your School
I am writing to you following the brilliantly successful pilot with Victoria Park & Knowle Park schools. And I am inviting you to become part of the most important educational challenge of our time.
It's about giving children a love for real food and giving them the skills & knowledge to cook delicious healthy food. And critically about giving your teachers the skills & confidence to teach cooking in the class room. Not the same as teaching maths.
It's about how food connects with every other subject on the curriculum. And how it can engage the whole school and the wider school community.
It's about in putting food education & cooking itself, so long on the margins of our cultural relationship with the food we eat, at the heart of the curriculum. And as important as any of these things is how it answers the question of what kind of a world do we want to live in.
In the old days, children would learn about food how to cook from their parents. But that was three generations ago.
After nearly 20 years of teaching cookery in Bristol I am still teaching grandmothers to make pastry and cook cabbage properly and how tell the difference between a parsnip and a swede.
So now, it's down to schools - particularly Primary Schools because the younger they start the easier it is. Cooking is just another language.
It's not difficult. All it takes is being awake to the world we want to live in.
Not before time, the government has finally realised that we need to teach cooking in schools. I believe this too. I would go further: I believe that we have a moral duty to make this happen and that in not doing so we are failing in our duty of care towards the children in our schools.
Nothing is more important than the food we eat.
This is not a sales pitch. Of course I believe that the programme we are offering Bristol schools is brilliant: simple, designed for purpose and delivered by serious food education practitioners to meet your school's individual needs. I also believe that this programme offers great value for money.
But the reason for this email is to try and engage you and all primary schools in Bristol in the debate.
Bristol's unique position in the UK's food scene has just been celebrated in the Bristol Food Connections Festival. No city in the world has done anything like this before. Next year, Bristol will be Europe's Green Capital and food will be a central theme to its mandate.
So two things:
One: Sign up for our Autumn programme to train and empower teachers to deliver exciting hands-on food education in line with the changes to the National Curriculum
Two: Get in touch and join the conversation.
Thank you for reading this. If you want to know more about the programmes for schools or the work SFF does, please get in touch.
Have a good summer
Barny