School cooking lessons

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School cooking price of ingredients!
Dc new to high school, cooking this week.
Cheesecake:
Butter £1.08
Biscuits £0.60
Soft cheese x3 £4.02
Strawberry £2.48
Cream £1.40
Chocolate £2.87

Other bits from kitchen- icing sugar, vanilla essence, tin etc.

Shocked at the cost tbh. Not a problem here but lots of families couldn't afford this fortnightly could they? I grew up in poverty and couldn't afford school cooking ingredients.

ehhhh????

ohhhh..... this is going to be good......

I can GUARANTEE that there is NO law that requires a school to teach Food Tech.

Would LOVE to be proved wrong.

You have a link?

my bestie taught secondary school “cooking” for years, school provided supplies, she shopped on a very tight budget. Fun fact the classes cooked and served the students at lunchtime once a week. Soups, bread, cake, chilli, stir fried rice etc.

Is that strange? My school always asked students to provide their own ingredients. And yes, even in the 00s, it could add up, as there were always weird things we didn't have in the cupboards that we only needed a tiny bit of!

Here.

https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2020-03-11/27952

I used to teach DT. It always came up in meetings, as the school had to accommodate it. It may have been removed, but it was definitely compulsory until recently.

Just shows that everywhere is different as DS has an EHCP and I always paid fully for all his supplies, on top of a set fee at the beginning of term for basics. GCSE food tech final exam cost me over £50 in ingredients as they had to make a three course meal with sides from scratch, which was themed to include some gluten free dishes and alternatives to wheat. Add that onto the cost throughout the year, it was a LOT. Luckily, he passed with an 8, and more importantly for us, gained lots of life skills (DS is autistic).

Agree that it's stupidly expensive

Mine has just started high school and I've had to buy different ingredients every single week

Amazing, very surprised that the school had a recipe which required kids to bring in alcohol.

We did. For several weeks they made us feed Christmas cakes with brandy. Which of course we sipped at lunchtime. Ah schools in the 90s....

So far DS has made fruit salad and pizza toast. His next one is pasta salad. Those sound more sensible than a whole cheesecake.

And here.

Im not saying all schools deliver it, and l think the Tories may have stopped funding it in 2023 now I’ve been researching it,

But it definitely was compulsory until they dickef about with it if they did,

I agree! My dd food tech bill came to £12 this week, they are making pesto! Pine nuts are expensive, along with feta cheese and olive oil! I wanted to email and ask if she’d lost her bloody mind but don’t want to look tight!

We also had a go at the sherry after making something Christmas related in food tech 😂 the 90’s eh!

The whole set up is ridiculous and expensive. At my request DD suggested that parents all contribute money for one order which would be much more cost effective but apparently ‘that would never work’ 🙄
And on another note, so far this year DS (yr7) has ‘cooked’ a sandwich and a fruit salad. Why even bother.

No way will those quantities serve 18 if most of them can eat as much cheesecake as I can.

misses point

This is one of my bugbears. We have to spend a fortune buying ingredients for them to take in, and some of them (e.g. mustard powder - 1 pinch was required for 1 recipe) we would never ever use at home after. You always have to buy more than is needed. Why they can’t buy in bulk and split the cost between the class like we did in the 90’d is beyond me. At least then the teacher will know everyone has the right ingredients!

But also with ours, they don’t even do the full thing in school. For lasagne recently my son had to prepare the bolognese part at home and then brought home the uncooked lasagne to cook it at home! What was the point?! I can’t remember the last time he had a cooking lesson that didn’t require part of it to be pre-prepared, or finished off, at home.

That's going to be an enormous cheesecake. I wish your child luck transporting it home in one piece.

Our school used to do a list of individual ingredients but thankfully switched to a payment for each practical lesson, usually around £1.50 - £2 and the teacher provided everything.

Portions looked to quite small but as very little actually made it home and the kids mostly ate what they cooked for lunch it was fine and so much more straightforward in terms of organising.

Most secondary schools are not maintained schools now. Over 80% of state secondary schools are not maintained and over 80% of secondary pupils are not in maintained schools. Schools like academies and free schools don’t have to follow the national curriculum.

Ill never forget when I spent a fortune on ingredients for my son who was making a niche Asian dish and then he wasn't allowed to cook as he forgot his apron.
I asked what had happened to the food (not that we could have used it as it was fresh meat and would have been out all day) and he said a girl in his class used it because she had remembered her apron but forgot the food!

The school provides the food for children on fsm but regularly substitute the ingredients, if my son was entitled I would buy the ingredients anyway, what's meant to enable them to be on par with everyone else is actually singling them out and showing them to be different as they dont have the same Ingredients.

I would have been very irritated with that 🙈

According to AI they still should be.

Bloody hell op. That's over 12 quid!

A perfect example of why people shouldn’t believe everything AI says. Academies must teach English, maths, science, relationships and sex education, and religious education. Beyond that they must provide a broad and balanced curriculum but do not have to follow the national curriculum. See this government page,

It’s not NC,

It was a government directive, academy or otherwise. I think it’s still in place ( not on teaching anymore)

And if academies aren’t teaching it, it shows what crap they are,

It was introduced to help combat obesity and ad so many children didn’t know where food came from. It was to help prepare them to be healthy adults and to avoid processed foods.

It is part of the national curriculum. The first link you posted even said national curriculum. It is why it only covers maintained schools.