Our Food and Catering curriculum provides students with the knowledge and skills required to seek further education or training and employment in the present and ever growing Hospitality and Catering business. The Hospitality and Catering industry is one of the most important employment sectors in the county.  

Skills developed through Food and Catering encourage  students’ resilience, team working skills and their ability to self organise whilst responding to customer needs and requirements. Students are expected to respond to design briefs, demonstrating technical food preparation and cooking techniques with flair and creativity shown in their solutions. Our ambition is to challenge our students beyond a pure knowledge based curriculum with project learning and give them the confidence in applying knowledge to experiment and be original with their ideas and outcomes.

Food and Catering is an umbrella subject that acts as a vehicle to contextualise and apply learning that happens across other curriculum areas such as maths, science, art and humanities as well as being an academic subject in its own right.

In the teaching of Food and Catering, we have repeat concepts which appear throughout the teaching of KS3 and 4 curriculum to develop the depth and breadth of knowledge. Our repeat concepts are:

• Understanding Health and Safety requirements
• Food safety
• The importance of nutrition from food
• Menu planning
• Food preparation and cooking processes
• The iterative process

As part of their work with food, students are taught how to cook and apply the principles of nutrition and healthy eating. Instilling a love of cooking in pupils opens a door to one of the great expressions of human creativity. Learning how to cook is a crucial life skill that enables students to feed themselves and others affordably and well, now and in later life.