Education and charity

	The Hoxton Apprentice

I’ve always been obsessed with vocational education. Probably because I never achieved a degree or indeed much beyond the 25 yds swimming certificate. I know from our own kitchens that even if a lad with no qualifications and no achievements (with his teachers, parents and everyone else, including himself, thinking he will never amount to anything) is sent by an agency to wash pots in one of our kitchens and is lucky enough to land in a kitchen where he gets training as well as discipline; where the Head chef expects him to manage the task he is given but explains things clearly and is encouraging, then guess what? 5 years later he’s head of his own little unit, with half a dozen other young lads under him.  And in 10 years, with night school and qualifications, he’s a head chef.

The Food Bus

Oops,forgive the lecture! Anyway, because of my interest in proper training and education and with the teaching of cooking, I got myself involved with endless charities to do with chef training, teaching children to cook in schools, training young people who had never got on in school, etc. The ones I am most proud of are probably The Hoxton Apprentice, a restaurant in Hackney training and turning disadvantaged young people into great cooks and waiters, and bar staff able to make a mean margarita; Focus on Food, which I initiated when I was Chair of the RSA, and which teaches children in school to cook, and also trains teachers to teach cooking. They have a fleet of huge pantechnicon buses which turn into fully equipped teaching classrooms.

	Kings College

And then there is 3E’s Enterprises, now part of a big architectural company, but which Valerie Bragg, a brilliant Head teacher started and still runs. It turns round failing state schools and manages the building and setting up of new ones.  The first school we tackled was the failing Kings Manor in Guildford, now Kings College, which was a fair disaster. It’s now a really good school, with children getting above average results. 3 E’s is responsible for a clutch (eight at the last count) of new schools, all doing well.

And finally, my current obsession: getting children to eat healthy school dinners.  I chair the School Food Trust, a government Quango set up to help schools meet the new food standards that became law after Jamie set the cat among the pigeons over school food.

Prue and children, SFT

Thank God he did. Many people, for many years, had been warning of the dangers of poor school food, of schools dependent on the proceeds of selling junk from vending machines in order to buy books or run the mini-bus, of obesity and general ill health. But it wasn’t until Jamie’s School Dinners hit our screens that teachers, parents and governors, and indeed Government, realised just how bad things had got. 

So now the law requires healthy food to be offered in schools. But supplying healthy food is not much good if the children don’t eat it. And it is our job at the School Food Trust to tackle everyone and get them to change their behaviour. We try to:

• persuade children to give school dinners a go;
• to encourage parents to feed them well at home and not to undermine the caterer’s efforts by sending them into school with pocketfuls of crisps and chocolate;
• to persuade teachers (and particularly heads) that it is important for the children’s health, concentration, motivation and achievement that they eat a healthy diet, and that they are more likely to do so if they are taught about food and how to cook at school;
• to persuade caterers to stick with it, because new foods are an acquired taste and children need to be persuaded to keep trying and;
• to persuade local authorities to provide the funding that will give the whole process time to work. At the moment rather less children are eating school dinners than were doing so pre-Jamie – hardly surprising since then you could get chips and ketchup every day, and now you’ll see chips only rarely.

	All dressed up at the palace for my O.B.E in 1989

The good news is that once a child learns to like something (and it may take several doses of broccoli or beans before they do!) they like it for life. And they’re not stupid. If they get to like a healthy diet, they’ll stick with it. No one wants to be spotty and fat!

There’s lots more if you are interested in school food. See School food trust website and, pretty exciting, we’ve won a lottery grant of £20 million to set up a nationwide network of cookery clubs under the Let’s Get Cooking banner.

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