Podcast tbc2025 – How secondary school food teaching has changed, with Chris Lord

Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. Thanks for listening today. We're going to be talking about secondary school food education today. So GCSE and Key Stage 3 teaching. Back in 2022, I interviewed Chris Lord, who's a school food teacher working in Hong Kong. We became online friends due to him setting up a Facebook account during lockdown where he was teaching his toddler Evie how to cook on YouTube.

Chris has been working in school food now, teaching for about 20 years. Because he's taught in Wales, England and Hong Kong, he's got some quite interesting perspectives on how we handle food teaching in the UK compared to other countries.

But in today's interview, we're talking about the changes he's seen in the UK curriculum in the last couple of decades and what he thinks about how it does or doesn't prepare students for cooking in real adult life. So here's that interview.

Joanne (01:11)
So Chris, you've been teaching school food now for a long time and obviously food education has changed a lot since we were at school and actually quite a lot in the last 10, 15 years. So what are the changes that you think have been good or bad and what do you hope will happen with UK school food in the future?

Chris Lord (01:27)
OK, well, yeah, I've seen the curriculum go round and round, go from domestic science to home economics when I was at school to then food technology, which is possibly the worst move I think the education department could have ever done to what's happened now. They've just introduced food preparation and nutrition. So I'll start off about why I think food technology was such a bad introduction to the curriculum, because that was teaching students as part of the technology faculty just to make the same thing six times, make a cheesecake, change the base, mean, yes, it gave them a good idea of the design process, but it was more teaching them how to make things for a factory environment. Not teaching, They didn't get a range of skills through it. They weren't necessarily learning about nutrition through it. And students to be honest got bored of the course, we work at GCSE. So it put people off, people put off doing that thinking, if I do this I might end up working in a factory, which is not necessarily the most inspiring way of doing it.

Joanne (02:38)
No, and it's important that people learn those skills if that's the way they're going to go with their life. But everybody needs to cook. Not everybody needs to work in food, but everybody needs to cook regardless, don't they?

Chris Lord (02:48)
Yep, so when I qualified as a teacher in 2003, the Welsh exam board, the WJEC was just launching hospitality catering GCSE, which when you looked at their assessment, it was cooking. So they had a written exam, which was still a bit of nutrition and things like that, but they had to do a three course meal in year 10 for a cuisine of their choice. A starter, main, and  dessert, which brilliant, you know, learn lot of skills through that. And then in year 11, they had to cook two sweets and two savoury dishes for an afternoon tea. So it made a lot more sense to me to teach that. And I taught that for nine years in the UK before I moved to Hong Kong and then had to teach the food technology course again, which is a little bit disheartening. And then three or four years after that then the exam boards got together and have made a really positive move and changed it to food preparation and nutrition. It's got an assessment all about food science, how to experiment with food, which is a better way of looking at it too. It still brings it into a sort of factory setting because you have to work out how changing one aspect will have an impact on the whole product, but it looks at nutrition in the exam and then you have to do a three course, so a three hour cooking assessment. so it really really builds skills. It really focuses on nutrition and it has the science element to it, which are the three main aspects, I think.

Joanne (04:25)
So you think that's going in the right direction then now?

Chris Lord (04:27)
it's definitely going in the right direction, the only issue is it's still part of the technology faculty, so you're not learning the skills, you're still doing the design process, you might have a 12-week project where you cook twice, whereas I took the principle of let's move out of the design technology faculty and move into the physical health education and we'll look at health. We'll cook.

Once every two lessons, one lesson will focus on a nutrient and then we'll cook a recipe that embeds that nutrient. So at the moment, Year 7s are looking at vitamins and we're making fruit salads and smoothies and fruit pancakes and then we'll move on to calcium and then we'll be making things with dairy products. so everything in Year 7 is based around breakfast and everything in Year 8 is based around lunches. And then everything in year nine is based around dinners. Or tea as I call it.

It's tea up north.

Joanne (05:25)
Yeah, I'm a Midlander as well, so it's tea for me too.

Chris Lord (05:34)
So, but yeah, I think it's definitely moved in the right direction and I'm part of a big network on Facebook called Food Teacher Centre. There's about 8,000 of us on there. We all realise how much better it is than it was with food technology.

Joanne (05:52)
Cool. So for food teachers that are listening or teachers who just want to be a bit more involved with food, that's the food... what was that called, that group?

Chris Lord (06:00)
The Food Teachers Centre. Yeah, Facebook group website, online training resources. It's a one stop shop for any food teacher. So anyone that's thinking of training, I would say go there. Anyone that isn't part of it, then you're missing out.

Joanne (06:02)
And your primary teachers who just have to do some of that as part of their curriculum, but aren't trained teachers, it still have useful things for them.

Chris Lord (06:25)
Yeah, it will do. mean, I'm not sure if you have to sign up or you can just access the resources to be honest. mean, I think you can just access the Facebook group you have to join but yeah, but yeah, there's lots of places like that, like License to Cook, Let's Get Cooking. There's lots of websites to promote cooking with children if you're a primary school teacher and there's lots of resources. The British Nutrition Foundation is where I go for most of my nutritional information, but that's got resources for every age group.

Joanne (06:58)
Great. I'll stick some of those in the show notes.

Chris Lord (07:00)
Yeah, British nutrition, license to cook and food, a fact of life. That's another one.

Joanne (07:06)
Great. I've used that website. That's a great website. Yeah.

Joanne Roach (07:16)
So I thought that was a really interesting perspective on how things have changed over time. And I recorded that in 2022 when I was originally planning to launch the podcast. And since then there have been a couple of changes. so the food teacher center that Chris referred to in the interview did a survey of their members in 2023 and the results were pretty interesting. So, in the last 10 years, have been quite a lot of changes in school food teaching, including the removal of A levels in food and changes to the standards required of food teachers. So there is a BTEC now, but there isn't any A level in food.

And as Chris said, food lived in the design technology department in most English schools since the 1990s. And people are starting to ask whether this is the right place for it. In the food teacher center survey, about one in five of the schools that replied have said that they are moving their food and nutrition teaching outside of their technology department. But the vast majority are still inside D&T. Most places still call it food tech as well, although the name food and nutrition is growing in usage.

A lot of the teachers who responded were concerned that there's not enough time to teach it as much as they felt was necessary, especially kind of key stage two, key stage three, when kids are just getting the skills where they could really get involved and learn to cook for themselves. And the fact that there are very limited vocational courses and no A levels means that kids have really got nowhere to go after GCSE with food. And so the future of food teaching itself could be in jeopardy from this.

There is a level 3 BTEC, but that's not necessarily suitable for everybody. And this closes off that route for kids who want to go to a sixth form with other A level courses because they want to study other things alongside, or they want to go to university and need the three A level courses. So it does close that off as a route for a lot of kids who might otherwise have continued with food to 18. So 89 % of the teachers in the survey wanted a reinstatement of the A level, and most of them were worried about the need for more specialist teacher recruitment in the future.

If you want to see the whole survey, I've put a link in the show notes. It was really interesting to see where the respondents were coming from and how they teach food in their different schools. The resources that Chris mentioned will also be linked in the show notes. And I found a lot of them really useful when I was working directly in school food. They also have quite a lot of well-balanced child-friendly recipes, which are great for like child-minders day nurseries and homeschoolers. But also there's quite a lot of good recipes just for like good balanced family meals that are child friendly. So a lot of those links are worth looking.

I hope you found this discussion interesting, even if you haven't got secondary aged children. Because I mostly work in primaries, I hadn't really thought much about GCSE food for a long time. What do you think? What do you remember from your own school classes, whether they were called Home Ec or Food Tech?

I can only really remember scones and crumble. So pop over to the post on Instagram and let me know what recipe from school you can remember the most. And thanks for listening today and I'll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, happy eating.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Chris Lord
01:05 Changes to food teaching and the pros and cons
05:35 Resources and Support for Food Educators
07:08 What teachers think about changes in the last ten years
08:12 The future of food teaching?