Oxfordshire's school cooks turn up the heat in School FEAST kitchen

Food With Thought, Oxfordshire County Council's school meal provider, set up a state-of-the-art training kitchen at Rose Hill, Oxford as part of School FEAST (Food Excellence and Skills Training). Led by the School Food Trust, School FEAST is a national network comprising 29 centres and partnerships dedicated to training the school food workforce. The School FEAST network, which was established in October 2006 by the School Food Trust, is critical to ensuring school cooks have the skills they need to transform the quality and provision of school food. Les Redhead, operations manager for Oxfordshire County Council's Food With Thought which already serves up 1.25 million school meals a year, said: "The aim of the School FEAST course is for kitchen staff to enhance their skills and use ingredients in a different and more inspiring way making school meals more tempting for the children. "They can then take their new ideas back to their colleagues at the county's primary schools. The course involves several days per term at the training kitchen with close assessment back in the work place as well. "We are already reaping the benefits with the rise in meal uptake by 100,000 on last year's figures. We want to be able to put at least one person from every primary school kitchen through the course." To celebrate the achievements of the first intake, graduates were invited to a special awards ceremony at County Hall in Oxford.