AIBU To pull my son out of food tech?

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To pull my son out of food tech.
My son isn't a bad cook at home, but at school most of the dishes are costing between £5-8 to make and are inedible. We have also lost 3 containers because of kids just grabbing whichever one looks best rather than their own!
AIBU to refuse to send stuff in from now on? He is only in year 8 so we have at least another year of this shit.

our school asks parents to pay an upfront fee in September which works well.

I don’t ever expect a meal to be brought home at the end of it. Sometimes it is but more often than not there’ll be one friend who likes it and will eat it.

My year 7 has made so far this year:

Tomato soup
Cheese and chorizo pasta bake
Lemon and pea risotto
Bread rolls
American style pancakes
Shortbread
Chickpea curry.

All came home, all was delicious, all was eaten by the family!

We’re having a similar experience. Some ingredients that we have to buy in a large portion and will never use again. The food is totally vile, one of the recipes involved frying some chicken up with Cajun seasoning and chucking some passata in, then mixing with pasta 🤢 Another was chickpea curry which had no vegetables in it, literally just chickpeas, curry powder, onion and coconut milk. It has cost me £5-10 most weeks for the ingredients. I wouldn’t mind that so much if he was being taught to cook healthy, tasty food, but I wouldn’t feed it to the dog 🤮

In my (year8) Sons school we don’t send in ingredients. We pay £20 at the start of the year and the school organise getting the ingredients as they can buy it in bulk.
Ive never seen anything he’s created because he eats it all before he gets home 🙈 so I assume it’s edible!

I remember my food tech lessons. One year, they had us baking the same thing 4 times, each time with a different ingredient substitution. Let's make a cake, with lard instead of butter, honey instead of sugar, plain flour instead of SR, milk instead of eggs. What have we learnt girls?

I learnt that my food tech teacher drove my dad up the wall and that he isn't made of money. Parents evening that year was mainly him asking her when would she teach us how to make a decent meat pie with all the appropriate ingredients included.

Do you do any cooking with him at home?

Y8 DD has cooked tasty things in Food Tech but she does quite a bit of cooking outside of school.

I am always pleased if she eats it all! She's fussy!!

What on earth are they making at £5-8 a pop?

Our secondary school had a yearly or termly fee - can't remember which but it was about £10 and the school bought the ingredients. Then DD got coeliac and they provided terrible substitute recipes, cross contaminated by floating flour and she spent year 8 and 9 in the library reading!

If the food he's bringing home is inedible then food tech lessons are even more important!
I love it when DD brings something home from Home Ec, though usually they eat what they make in class, especially if its a meal rather than a baked good (part of the lesson is setting the table nicely with napkins folded into shapes and suchlike for everyone to eat together)

If you speak to the teacher they will provide the ingredients but your son won’t be able to bring the food home. I taught Home Ec and the children always took home edible food.

This. Talk to some other parents and buy eg a bag of flour for the kids to share.

That’s appalling that you have to pay for something that’s on the curriculum.

is that an English thing. We don’t pay for curriculum education in Scotland.

kids need to learn to cook and it’s great that schools do it. Of course your son needs to participate. Label your containers and tell him to stop pissing about and concentrate on following the recipe properly. Ask for help if he cannot. No school recipe needs to cost £5-8. What is it that is costing you that much? If you cannot afford ingredients then the school will help you. Schools cannot do right can they.

You can't pull him out of this subject. As pp have said, don't pay if you can't afford it. Where I work, all parents pay a contribution at the start of the year, if they can afford it. School then buys the ingredients in bulk.
Knowing the standards and expectations of many FTech teachers, I would be surprised if the food is inedible. Is he lacking focus and effort do you think?
Mark hid plastic boxes with a Sharpie like other parents/carers do.

No. It's not common in schools in England.

Ultimately learning to cook is trial and error, he won't ever improve if he does not continue to participate in guided practice, at school or at home. We often do the same dish from food tech again at home to continue on that learning, the kids usually get it after 2 or 3 goes and it's a great life skill.

I would be using the cheapest possible containers only though and write the child's name on it for ease. I don't think it's unreasonable to feed back to the school regarding costings or the container mix up's but even if it were possible to pull him out (very unlikely) then I don't see why it's necessary.

The lengths some people will go to to avoid in any way funding their child's education is gobsmacking.

But have they made a Victoria sponge cake yet? 😀
(I am a battle-scarred veteran of the school subject formerly known as Domestic Science and there are some things everybody ought to know.)

If you inform the school that you don't want your son to bring the results of the lessons home, and that you can't/won't afford to buy the ingredients, they can't make you pay. Legally no child can be excluded from education (the curriculum, not additional education and activities) because their parent can't or won't pay a contribution. It's easy to look this up in more detail.

Why no adult supervision ?
How can anyone learn to cook without a teacher teaching them how to ?

My dd school doesn't charge for it. Always seems strange as even when I was at school we had to pay a fee every term for it. Her school is in a well off catchment as well with most sending oping to send to state then private due to it being a good school

Yes, and schools always confirm that this and any payment for school trips etc is a voluntary contribution.

Students are always supervised - a good ratio of staff to students, usually. They are never left unsupervised.
They're cooking in Food Tech rooms which are modern, well equipped and very clean.
I'm not sure what you're imagining, but times have changed!

This. Parents need to wind their necks in and stop interfering with every little detail of school life that they don’t like. It’s ridiculous.

Yanbu, my son has just finished Nat5 cookery (Scottish equivalent of GCSE) and it didn't cost us a penny. We don't have to provide ingredients or containers. Schools here aren't allowed to ask for money for things that are a part of the curriculum, 'cost of the school day' and all that.

Not much made it home and a lot of the food was questionable, but I think I'd resent it if it was costing me £30-£40 a month.