Do your kids bring ingredients to school for food tech ?

[Shishasister]

Private Day school announced that due to health and safety pupils supply own ingredients.
Today it was 250g beef mince, can of tomatoes, box of tomatoe paste, 250g milk , 6 sheets of lasagna, 25g butter, 25g flour, 50g of grated cheese, 15ml of oil , and onion, a.carrot and a oven proof dish ..
Oh and pepper and mixed herbs.

Health and safety my arse , a child carrying raw meat and milk in a rucksack is more of a risk. 🤢
Plus I spent an exorbitant amount on last minute purchasing that surely would be more reasonable in bulk. Yes the dish came home but nobody will eat it except maybe the dog.

State secondary: annual charge for ingredients.

Food tech teacher here! I'm not quite sure how you think it would work other than the kids bringing their own stuff into school? If there is only one teacher then expecting them to shop for every child in the school BEFORE they start their actual teaching job is a bit much. The health and safety thing makes no sense to me? Maybe ask them to explain that but further. Possibly the choice to switch to bringing own ingredients is down to staffing issues? Maybe a lack of technicians in the school?
Either way I'd be happy that my child was being able to participate in food tech lessons. Also, I think your attitude towards the food your child is bringing home is not good. "Only the dog will eat it" excellent encouragement there! Personally I'd be congratulating my child on preparing and cooking a dish by themselves.

My DDs school provides it all, so it is possible.

Just to add, I'm pretty sure it is not the school policy to be carrying warm food around all day. Maybe your child isn't following the correct procedures. Every school I've worked at has been drop off ingredients before school (cold food put in the fridge) and then cooked food left to cool on the counter and collected from the fridge at the end of school.

My best friend regularly subs in food tech and 100% does the whole class shop.

Dd is in private and they supply all ingredients.

I couldn’t imagine them expecting raw meat to be sloshing around school bags for hours and then to be edible after cooking. That is one sure way to give someone food poisoning!

Whole class is a bit different to whole school. It's not physically possible if there's one teacher and he/she teaches roughly 100 kids per day, 5 days a week!

All supplied by school.

No charge.

As it should be.

@rollonretirementfgs

Food tech teacher here! I'm not quite sure how you think it would work other than the kids bringing their own stuff into school

Our school provides everything so they've clearly found a way

Well my DS2 in private school doesn’t have to take any ingredients. It’s all provided by the school. My DS1 at a state school does have to take ingredients. The former is much easier from a parent point of view!

Yes of course it's doable, if you have the staff. Some schools don't! I worked at a state school who had the funding for a full time technician, a part time technician who did the shopping and we paid for all of the ingredients. My current school doesn't have anywhere near the budget for that

We always took our own ingredients when I was at state school, approx 100 years ago.

DSs school gets a supermarket delivery of stuff twice a week.

I believe some of the senior pupils deal with sorting the delivery as part of their school community challenge thing.

An hour on the bus getting to school is no different to some people getting home from a supermarket with their shopping .

In the 1970's this was home economics. The majority of ingredients were supplied by the school, but we had to take meat or fish in. I remember at break time seeing our cookery teacher Mrs McSkimming cutting blocks of margarine into two ounce sections without weighing, everything was prepped before we arrived. Now I think what a waste of a teachers time that was.

My husband (at 13) was told to bring pork in so he could make sweet and sour pork. His Mum refused to waste good meat so she sent him in with a tin of spam instead. He said his sweet and sour spam was vile! 😁

Middle school here, rather than secondary, but we pay £25 for the year to cover all DT materials/ingredients (food tech, textiles, and woodwork). They rotate which discipline they're doing each half term.

I don't see how it is any harder for the food tech teachers to order in what's needed than the woodwork teachers? Surely you lesson plan that eg yr7 are making shepherds pie this week and put in a bulk order for what you need to the catering supplier along with the other year groups' ingredients. Similarly, over in the workshop, yr7 will be making acrylic keyrings, so the teachers in that department ensure the sheets of acrylic are ordered and delivered in time in the right quantities? Obviously, once you get to the point they are designing and cooking their own recipes, DCs will need to bring in their own ingredients in the same way I had to bring in timber for my resistant materials GCSE.

When my DM was at school, they would have their cookery lesson just before lunch so they would all sit together to eat what they'd made, which I always thought sounded like a lovely idea (and avoids the nightmare of trying to get it home in an edible state!).

Our school does a mix. £10 at the start of the year which covers things like spices, oil. Small bits. Then the bigger bits they bring in when needed. Works well.

Always had to take ours in at school. I dumped everything I made as the department was bogging and once there were ants I. The ti exams we were told just to skim them off with a strainer.

They gave us cold water to wash dishes, washing up liquid that was actually just water with the tiniest amount of soap. The utensils and dishes in the cupboard were always slightly greasy or had something stuck to them and the cutting boards were stored vertically under the benches so were right next to people shoes and probably kicked regularly as well. I could cook better as a teenager than the basic shite they had us making.

When I was in school we had to take all our own ingredients in and it use to drive my mum mad but my children’s school provide everything they need, including tubs to transport it home in. I just pay £25 for the year and job done.

Yes, and my dd did too. I don't think I'd ever heard of secondary schools providing food tech ingredients before.

My old private school used to require all ingredients to be brought in. Also that we brought them in using a basket (not in a bag but in an actual weave type basket) . When I first joined (before the days of easy online shopping on amazon) my parents were like where the feck does one find a basket. Walked around town for a whole afternoon not being able to find one and ended up having to persuade whittards to sell us one of their customer shopping baskets. 🙄

Yes, with supermarket deliveries, it should be much easier for the school to do it.

I remember having to take all the ingredients to school in a quality sweets tin when I was at school in the 1980s.

Yes, with supermarket deliveries, it should be much easier for the school to do it.

Who should be placing the orders for those 30 periods a week? When should they be doing that?

We pay £4.50 per term for basic ingredients- they will be required to take extras in.
Ds hasn’t done food tech yet so not sure what these extras are!

My son is at state school and always has to bring in his own ingredients.