Let's Get Cooking
Obesity, malnutrition, ill-health… these are all issues that children, their parents and local communities are facing. In deprived areas, the lack of basic skills and knowledge does not always allow for wise choices about nutrition and health to be made.
Let’s Get Cooking is a five year, £20 million programme managed by The School Food Trust. With funding from The Big Lottery Fund, the programme will set up a network of 5,000 after school cooking clubs in England. The project will benefit over a million children and young people between the ages of five and sixteen.
Two of The Prince’s Charities, Business in the Community and The Prince’s Trust are working in partnership with The School Food Trust. Together they are working with children, families and communities to boost their intake of nutritionally healthy food, increase their cooking skills and then take these skills and habits and replicate them at home.
Business in the Community, one of The Prince’s Charities that works with businesses to make a positive impact in their communities, is engaging key companies to support and sustain the Let’s Get Cooking after school clubs. This will enable businesses to take action on the issues of health, nutrition, obesity, education and improving skills. Businesses will be working with the clubs in many ways. They will be supplying employee volunteers to help with the running of the clubs and attaining a healthy eating vision for the schools, as well as helping with in-kind support by way of ingredients, equipment and help with community events.
“It’s amazing how much stuff you can do with food and how healthy foods can actually be good for you as well as tasty. I honestly enjoyed something and learnt for once! I will most certainly be going again next week!” Year 10 pupil from Ormskirk School.
The Prince’s Trust is involved with Let’s Get Cooking through their xl Programme, a team-based programme of personal development for students in their last two years of compulsory education. It aims to roll out the Let’s Get Cooking opportunity in phases across the xl Network, working with around 610 xl clubs from September 2007 to June 2012.
So far twenty xl clubs in the South West, North West and Eastern regions have been involved in piloting the new materials to create inspirational and imaginative ways of engaging with cookery, nutritional awareness and understanding of healthy eating within the context of the xl curriculum. This has involved tutor led taught sessions to provide underpinning knowledge, advice and guidance around these subjects whilst ensuring the current curriculum objectives are met.
The feedback from the xl clubs has been very positive so far and the young people have loved having the opportunity to work with different foods and topics that they may not have encountered before. An example of this is a competition which The Prince’s Trust ran for the twenty clubs to thank them for participating in the pilot. Entrants had to create a recipe out of a list of certain ingredients ensuring that they were within budget. It received over eighteen entries which were then judged by Ainsley Harriot from Ready Steady Cook. The first three prize winners and their clubs were then given the opportunity to be a part of the programme’s audience.
The Prince’s Trust is now in the process of recruiting 120 clubs to be a part of the project from September 2008, using the materials which have been developed throughout the pilot. Working together with Business in the Community, it hopes to be able to offer these clubs various opportunities including free equipment, expertise from volunteers and links to businesses for future use.
“I like working on healthy eating as quite a lot of the time our adviser lets us eat what’s left over. I’ve tried loads of new fruit since the xl club and can’t wait to start cooking in the club.” xl participant.
Posted 4th July 2008
