The new centre will provide training and continuous education for cooks, kitchen assistants, lunch-time supervisors, school business managers, school governors, senior leadership staff, pupils and their parents. Across the network, School FEAST offers a core list of training and qualifications. Added to this core offer are many localised, bespoke training courses. At Doncaster, this includes Food and Drink Service, Customer Service, Hospitality Supervision and Leadership level 3, Chef Diploma level 1, and Professional Cookery.
Prue Leith said; “The School FEAST Network signals a training revolution for school cooks and other school staff. I’m delighted to help launch Doncaster’s School FEAST facilities, which will now play a key role in nurturing the school cooks of the future, training scores of staff across hundreds of schools in the region. This will help ensure more children and young people eat a healthy school lunch every day.”
The School FEAST network was established in October 2006 by the School Food Trust and is critical to ensuring school cooks have the skills they need to transform the quality and provision of school food.
Doncaster’s School FEAST purpose-built kitchens will provide a readily accessible supply of high quality training and ensure the school food workforce is motivated and encouraged to take up the training needed. This is especially critical since the introduction in September for all schools to follow new government guidelines for food and nutrition-based standards.
Gill Parkes, Academy Director, Academy of Commercial Enterprise, said: “The new School FEAST kitchen facilities at the college will allow us to live up to our name and become a ‘Hub of Activity’ for the raising of standards and the up-skilling of the local school meals workforce. It will enable us to reach a wider audience of school leadership groups, school children, families and local community groups."
