AIBU To pull my son out of food tech?

[Summerishere123]

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.

And it’s not supposed to be edible. My mum used to live in dread of the unidentifiable concoctions that I brought home from Home Economics. They weren’t in good shape when I left school but by the time they got home on my bicycle there was no hope for them.

Same in England. All provided, as pp have clarified.

I can't believe you need to pay. Our schools never charged anything when they make something.

Off topic but I hate it when parents use the phrase ‘I’ll pull them out of school/lessons’ It just sounds so unnecessarily aggressive. It’s never used in any other context other than school and it gives me the ick. Stop throwing your weight around and pulling people out of things and just speak to teachers calmly if there is an issue. Jeez

Yes, you'd be very unreasonable to withdraw your child from food tech lessons, and I'm not sure the school would be fine and dandy with that, anyway.

It's pretty hard to make edible ingredients actually become inedible in the time available to school kids in a food tech lesson, unless there's either basic food safety failings at play, or purposeful sabotaging of the cooking is going on.

You say he's not a bad cook. What do you think is going on to make the foods you sent him in with inedible?

But, £5-8 quid every lesson to get kids to a basic level of proficiency in food tech shouldn't be necessary, so perhaps it's worth a discussion with the school as to their approach. For comparison, most of things that are made at my kid's school use in the main things that people who have kitchens and use them to prepare meals are likely to have anyway (i.e. 'store-cupboard staples'), and a small amount of fresh ingredients. I could get to £5-£8 each time if I had to buy the minimum available quantity of each ingredient from a supermarket each time (e.g. for an omelette: 6 eggs, bunch of spring onions, block of butter, block of cheddar, one red pepper), but given the actual quantities used tend to be a fraction of what you can buy, the ingredients for lessons at my son's school usually work out at less than £2.50 a time, and it usually produces something the kids can eat for lunch. If your child's school isn't doing likewise, perhaps that's something to bring up with them.

Of course you cant just pull him out. Speak to the school and have a word with your son about loosing the container.

That sounds like a great subject / way to learn a life skill. Did he enjoy it and has it made him more confident / likely to cook at home?

Part of my job is to be a technician on food tech lessons. With the younger years it’s a chaos most of the time. One hour is not always enough when you have to run through the recipe at the start, then prep, cook and wash up and clean all the surfaces. All needs to be done before the next class walks in.

At the end of the week we always have lots of containers left behind, only about 5% of them are named. Lots of food also left in the fridge which are binned after a certain time. Many many reminders are sent yet this happens every week. Most of these containers get binned at the end of the term as no-one seems to want them back. There is no room to keep them forever.

But it is also a joy to see the pupils excitement when there’s muffins, biscuits etc on the menu. Funnily enough these types of food are never left behind!

Year 9’s just come in and get on with it. By then they need hardly any supervision. I love seeing how competent they have become. They cook and bake some really impressive stuff. Not to mention the standard year 10’s and 11’s produce!

They can't force op to buy the ingredients though, if that was the battle she chose to take on.

@SunnyRedSnailfood standards agency recommends you don’t

Yes he enjoyed it, it was one of his favourite subjects. Unfortunately his school do not continue it onto Higher.
He's a very capable but cook but unfortunately chooses not to use those skills at home!

The final exam is to prepare a set 3 course meal, they are provided with a recipe, within a set time I think 2.5hours. They all cover theory as well, things like food hygiene and nutrition. I'm sure GCSE course will be pretty similar.

Ds either has a double lesson or if it's a single lesson they do the recipe and instruction the previous lessons so the cookery lesson they just come in and get started. I imagine still chaotic but to do it all in an hour is madness!

Food technology technician here 👋🏻

If your son is regularly forgetting his container and often bringing home inedible food I would say he perhaps need to focus more on these lessons. It’s very unlikely the school would allow him to not participate in these lessons, they form part of the curriculum and are often a useful skill for young people.

At no time should students be left unsupervised in a food lesson, if this is happening regularly then pls discuss with the school. If you are finding it hard to cover the cost of the ingredients then definitely discuss with the school. We always try to help families who are finding it hard to afford ingredients, especially if they are those on ‘pupil premium’ or free school meals.

If you think he’s not learning anything or achieving what you would expect during lessons then I would discuss with the class teacher or head of department. Lessons can be busy but if the teacher and support staff are doing a decent job it shouldn’t be chaotic at all.

Hope that helps and if anyone has questions I’m happy to answer! It’s really a fab subject for young people to be studying, I work with students all the way up to A-level and what they produce is fantastic!

That's not actually true. Every time you heat and cool something it goes through the prime bacteria increasing temperatures twice. Of course the guidelines are designed to err on the side of caution, so if you used cooked chicken to make a curry and then reheated it later it would quite likely be fine, but I wouldn't want to risk it. I especially wouldn't risk it with rice, which is already very high risk. It's fine to cook rice and then reheat it once (or eat it cold) as long as it's stored correctly, but I definitely wouldn't reheat it more than once. Schools definitely shouldn't be telling kids that it's good practice to reheat stuff more than once.

OP I am with you, my dd loves the lessons so I am just sucking it up but it costs what you have said and it gets usually gets wasted, especially if it’s chicken as it’s been out of the fridge too long and we don’t know if it’s been cooked or stored sufficiently. Even cornflake buns cost me a fortune with the amount of chocolate we had to send in plus extra ingredients and toppings. I would love to be at a school where we just paid them to sort it, at least it would save me the mental load of buying everything!

That made me chuckle 😃.

The only things you’re allowed to withdraw from are sex Ed and religious Ed. There’s no moral exception for food tech.

You can absolutely tell the school that you can’t afford to provide the ingredients, however I suspect they only have funding to support kids already on pupil premium.

U can’t pull them out but I would recommend messaging the head of subject & school & explaining the issues your having. Also encourage any other parents that have the same issues to do the same.
At the start of the year we received an email complaining that the students didn’t have the correct equipment for lessons. I emailed back asking for a list of equipment they’d need for the year. I can’t magic up cake tins when DC decides to look the night b4 🤦‍♀️. The response was that it was a great idea that they just hadn’t thought of. I’ve yet to get a list but sometimes they can’t fix an issue because they haven’t realised it’s a problem.
Agree on the cost at my dd’s school you buy & send the ingredients which can really start to add up £ wise, especially when I had 2 dd’s cooking some weeks. Thankfully they can drop it from year 9 which one did but the other has taken it to GCSE’s. Where there’s been pasta flour & salmon 😳

I find this quite strange. I don’t disbelieve you.
But that it should take the teachers longer with younger ones. And it is chaos.
And that ones in year 9 don’t need supervision ? If anything that is when they will learn the most. And absolutely should have a teacher there.

My own experience of cookery was years ago admittedly. Chaos would not have been tolerated. At all. She didn’t shout or anything, but you knew who was in charge. And it wasn’t you. She was a very pragmatic teacher and we had to scrub down old fashioned tables with bristle brushes. We tidied up. Not the teacher.

As we got older, that is when we needed more guidance. And learnt more.
And the teacher then was a new one, slightly ‘good housekeeping’ but keen to teach. Which she did.

I cannot fathom a school where children are in chaos, don’t get involved with clearing up after themselves, and those who are older are left to their own devices to learn.

There must be a better way.

And that's £5 down the drain which could feed a family 2 dinners. Instead wasted on food no one wants to eat

The school required a pinch of this herb and a spoon of a spice for stuff requiring buying two tubs of stuff never to be used again can't think of any bloody reason that couldn't have paid a very small contribution towards herbs and spices to the school

And even the cat wouldn't eat my dd1s kedgeree that we had to buy expensive smoked haddock for. Terrible waste of money

In all honesty the inedibility is why he needs to stay in the classes.

The container should be able to be sorted by emailing the school and saying could you please have your named container back each week. A staff member will have to oversee this. That shouldn't be beyond your son and a staff member to help him ensure this,

It sounds to me as though you are letting your son off quite lightly for things he could take more control of.

I have 2 boys in secondary school. I've yet to eat anything they've made as it's never made it home. But they've both learned how to cook semi decent meals.

We pay a voluntary £15 a year DT contribution for all materials and they rotate between food tech, wood work, textiles etc throughout the year.

I think you've wandered into the wrong classroom. Aim for the computer labs - out of here, down the stairs, through the double doors, along the corridor, out of the door, across the field, into the other building, and tell the receptionist you're there for an IT lesson - they should be able to help you.

No one should be paying for the supplies unless you opt in to the subject. That’s crazy. And then it should be everyone pays a set an amount and the teacher buys the ingredients in bulk for the Lesson.

Maybe he can cook the stuff he likes to eat perfectly well. Just not the crap the school decides on.

Apple crume that you have to take in tinned apples for and piss all about making crumble mix with flour and butter etc. No sense in that