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.

@Summerishere123 That sounds like the school have planned an unrealistic set of things for the students to make. They need that feedback.

Maybe not chaos in a literal sense but these lessons are very busy. Most kids need a lot of help. Some have never cracked an egg for instance. Some take the electric scales to the sink to wash them. Many of them don’t even know how to hold a knife or they hold the scissors the wrong way round. They are not ND, they are just not exposed to chores, cooking and practical tasks at home.

Year 9’s are more independent because they have had two years worth of learning the basics. They are also more mature and they are the ones who have chosen food tech as their GCSE subject. Not sure what there is hard to understand?

Kids do the washing up and cleaning but because often the time is tight, the teacher and I sometimes have to step in to speed up the process before the next class walks in.

As this thread shows, food tech lessons vary a lot from school to school. My DS had only four weeks of food tech lessons in Y8. It was meant to be six weeks but the teacher had other more pressing responsibilities 🙄.

My kids school did this.

They took ingredients from my kids every week and shared it around those who didn't bring any in.

Can't tell you how much that pissed me off.

Just put the ingredients in the free takeaway food containers or food bags. Most schools rotate the different technologies so only do food tech for a few weeks a year so yes yabu and very tight.

I don't remember most of my Food Tech stuff being edible after sitting on the side all day (the lesson was in the morning) and then on the school bus ride home... and TBH, my family couldn't eat most of it due to cheese-induced migraines.

It's a better system when the school buys the ingredients and the students and their families all chip in. That way, there is a lot less wastage, rather than 30 children all having an ingredient that they don't like/need (especially if they don't cook from scratch at home).

Better than 6 weeks designing a hand-held snack. I was the TA for five sets of Y7s, for six years. We had 12 year old children attempting to out-design Waitrose and M&S. Nightmare

If you genuinely can’t afford the ingredients then I would let the school know. They must have some kind of plan in place for this.

Have you never made a casserole then? They are better the next day when reheated

I’m so confused by the idea that people are providing ingredients for food tech!

Why are so many parents just accepting schools committing school funding fraud? It’s a pretty basic rule of law that education is free.

food tech stuff is always awful because the kids just don’t have time to do it properly so there’s no way it should be costing parents money for food to be made inedible as part of the national curriculum!

At my DD’s school they ask for a contribution every term and they provide the stuff it’s great!

This boggles me. I did Home Economics in the 70s and by the last couple of years we were making every kind of pastry, every kind of sauce (teacher was Cordon Bleu trained so that might have influenced it) and at 14 had made our own Christmas cake from scratch, including the marzipan and royal icing.

I think teaching kids to cook is great, probably essential, but they have to be invested and if they're going home with random things they didn't make, they won't have any heart in it. I think that's the problem OP.

You would think this would be the most cost effective and efficient way of doing it. Economies of scale, no one will forget, if any child struggles to afford it the school would know in advance and can plan accordingly. It seems a bit living life on the edge expecting all the kids to remember to bring the correct items in!

Completely disagree. Highly likely due to budget and time constraints that it’s a large class with poor resources. Generally for younger pupils they have an hour from when the bell goes in their previous lesson to arrive to Food tech, unpack ingredients and prepare cook, pack and store a product made. They generally find it stressful, try their very best and don’t mess around. Food teachers work their socks off with frequently poor resources such as not enough cookers, not enough fridges and not enough technician support to help manage this, and it’s infuriating at the end of the day to see a fridge with leftover containers because the child forgot or couldn’t find their container, however well marked in their panic to catch the coach bus or lift before it leaves school. I would complain to the Headteacher if you want someone to sound off to. It not your child or the teacher.

OK, so the main problem is the unsupervised collection? You could feed back to school about that. Can your son get there more promptly, or nip in at the end of lunch and get it? It's unlikely to go off in an hour.

Of course you can reheat meat ! Do you never reheat leftovers?

Why wouldn't you sharpie your kids name on the container?

Is food tech in every high school? Is it compulsory and all teenagers have to take it?

Sorry for asking daft questions but I didn’t grow up in this country and we don’t have food tech back home. I’m a soon-to-be mum of 2 and this post got me really worried that I will go through this ordeal in 10+ years myself 😂 Doesn’t sound fun at all

I think I would try signing the container with my child’s name in big letters so other kids don’t take it?

We had this issue. School promised that it would only need store cupboard ingredients like flour, eggs, rice etc. so only very occasionally would we need to buy say, chicken , maybe a pepper…
Fast forward to just before full lockdown: sushi nori. Imagine trying to find that and explain you’re buying essential goods!
Not to mention the many spices, rice wine vinegars and sauces we never used again!
And we had to measure everything individually. No scales, knives etc at school. Eh?!!
I’d have loved an apple crumble or a bun. We even lost a new flan dish!
They enjoyed it though.

Well minw did. Certainly nothing they'd choose to earlt

Most people only reheat it once You can reheat it more but has to be quickly cooled to safe temperature and stores well, not in a bag on the bloody school bus for example

Oh heck, I don’t miss those days. The worst was when we had to send in all the ingredients for a cottage pie. They were making it from scratch, in an hour. The ingredients were £8-£9, and the pie was disgusting and probably a health hazard - half raw mince, lumpy potatoes, hard carrots… and then there was the time they had to bring in the ingredients for a cauliflower korma - at that point my DS begged me not to get the ingredients so he could just take the detention!

It’s a tough one for teachers though, I guess, between dietary requirements, food preferences, time, and trying to make the food affordable and edible. In terms of what would be most useful for them to be able to cook I’d like to see:

A simple tomato pasta sauce
Rice and pasta
A basic pizza dough
Shortbread (so quick and easy)
An omelette
A basic curry sauce
A stir fry

Things that they’d actually use in their day to day lives.

That's reheated once though

I like how they do it at DD's school. They all do a full year of it in 7th grade (year 9 equivalent) and not just an hour a week, they get a whole morning or afternoon for it, and have plenty of time to cook several things each lesson (in groups, so not each person cooking several things but as a group splitting the tasks) and then sit down and eat it (sometimes eat other groups cooking to do peer evaluation). They also had to cook at home for their homework (if parents agreed to it - parents then send in pictures of completed homework) and do housework for extra credit. Then they choose if they want to continue it for the last two years, and its a very popular choice. In the last year they have a gingerbread house competition and every year there's some marvellous professional looking creations.

I HATE this.

I actually wrote to the school about this and said it would be far more economical for everyone if we paid a termly fee. Then the school used that money to buy the ingredients rather than 120 students all buying stuff they may not ever use the rest of again.

My suggestion was that every week two students order all the supplies for the next lesson. They get Tesco delivery for other stuff so it could be added onto that delivery.

It seems absolutely ridiculous that 120 people are potentially buying let’s say chilli powder, to only use a teaspoon each.

Add into that, like you say, the food is awful and the Tupperware gets lost or broken.

It’s not. My daughters secondary school do zero food tech so was surprised to see some people saying it is compulsory. I am in England so 🤷🏻‍♀️