“Our curriculum promotes social mobility;

we give our children the roots to grow and the wings to fly.”

Food Education at St George’s

Intent:

One of our curriculum drivers is “Healthy Body, Healthy Mind” which aims to help our children keep happy and healthy. One aspect of this that we have focussed upon at St. George’s is Food Education due to the poor health indicators within our community. Our intent is that the children will all develop a deep understanding of how they can eat and drink healthily which will positively impact on their physical and mental health.

They will develop the knowledge of different food groups, how fruit and vegetables grow, food provenance and some food production practices. Children will also develop the skills needed to make healthy dishes.

Implementation:

In 2017, we opened our own school kitchen. We employ three chefs and provide food for another local school, too. All our menus rigorously adhere to the School Food Standards and the children have three healthy options to choose from every single day. All children help to design our seasonal menus as they provide termly feedback to our chefs about the dishes they like the most and those which are not so popular. Our chefs provide the children with food taster sessions before a new menu is released so the children have experienced all the dishes beforehand.

We have a school Food Council which is made up of one child from each of the classes. These children work particularly closely with our Food Education subject leader, Mrs. Turner, and our school chefs. Their job is to liaise between their classes and the kitchen team and to promote healthy eating with their peers.

Throughout the year we work with an outside agency called ‘We Can Grow’ to help our children appreciate the Farm to Fork philosophy. We are very fortunate to have a large ‘Rainbow Allotment’ at St. George’s and the We Can Grow team help our children with seasonal planting and harvesting plus the scientific knowledge involved in growing fruit and vegetables. It is always an exciting time when our home grown produce ends up on our dinner plates!

To encourage our children to be more adventurous in their eating, our Food Education scheme of work follows the Sapere philosophy. SAPERE was created out of the conviction that taste education is good for health. We believe that helping young children to understand and enjoy the pleasures of a varied and balanced diet helps lay the foundations for healthier eating in the longer term. We have mapped out a scheme of work from the EYFS up to Year 6.

More can be read about it here: https://www.sapere-association.com/

Impact

Our school lunches are the highlight of the day for a lot of our children! We know they enjoy their food as we see it every day. The take-up for school meals is high.  Food is very important to our learners; they have strong opinions about it and can increasingly speak about which foods are healthy and which are not.

Through our Sapere food education lessons and growing our own fruit and vegetables we have seen a significant improvement in children being brave enough to taste new foods. We are also very proud that we have been awarded the Bronze Food 4 Life Award. We are only two points away from getting our silver award.