More than 100 school kitchen staff travelled from 35 schools across the country on 2nd September to hear from renowned chefs and food campaigners who support the charity’s mission to improve child health through school food.
Speakers included TV chef and school food campaigner Jamie Oliver; Dame Prue Leith - restaurateur, television presenter, cookery writer and novelist; the charity’s co-founder and author of the School Food Plan, Henry Dimbleby; and its chief innovation officer, Nicole Pisani; a cookbook writer and former head chef at Ottolenghi’s NOPI restaurant.
Attendees took part in kitchen skills workshops and shared their winning recipes and food education hacks.
Prue Leith said: “It's extraordinary how for many, many years, this country thought they didn't need to train school cooks, they would just know how to cook. Food is like anything else, it changes all the time, and we're far more knowledgeable now than we used to be about nutrition, and what we should be eating. We have to make what children should be eating taste wonderful, so it's what they want to be eating.”
Jamie Oliver, who helped highlight the poor quality of some school meals back in 2005, addressed the group of school kitchen staff with a specially recorded video message to kick off the day.
He told them: “What you do individually is really powerful and the dedication and thoughtfulness that you put forward to looking after our kids 190 days a year is amazing, it’s immense. It’s no mean feat but it makes the world of difference to those children.
“School food has certainly come a long way since I filmed the documentary 18 years ago - Jamie’s School Dinners - and there’s still so much more that we can do and so much more to achieve. We have to get every child access to delicious, healthy and nutritious meals every day, and we’ve got to keep fighting for that.”
The conference was deliberately organised on an inset day, which the charity thinks should in future be used as school chef training days.
Cynthia Owie, a catering assistant from London, said: “When we gather together like this, we achieve the best and it will make us fly. It will make the kids happy as well.”
Russ Ball, a Bournemouth head chef, said: “Seeing what other schools do is inspiring and useful for all of us.”
And Tiago Padilha, a London sous chef, added: “Being here with all the chefs gave me ideas of what I can do at my school and in the garden.”
Sam Phillips, chefs alliance director at Chefs in Schools, concluded: “This event showed the benefits of setting aside time to network and share ideas. There is limited training that takes place in the school kitchen from your head chef through to kitchen assistants. Chefs tell us they can feel isolated and overlooked for development, we have to change that and put food at the heart of a school.”
The charity plans to make the training conference an annual event, providing unparalleled support and opportunities to learn. To find out more about the training on offer from Chefs in Schools, visit here.