School food programmes

Our school food programmes encourage a ‘whole-school’ approach to food and support wider strategic goals for schools, from tackling social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) difficulties and improving physical health and wellbeing, to building cultural capital and meeting the Gatsby benchmarks for good careers education. 

We are currently running three programmes in local secondary and primary schools based around food: 

• Careers in food: We are supporting teachers and young people to understand career pathways into good jobs and careers in food through interactive workshops, inspiring careers events and new work-related learning opportunities including a programme of school visits and fish preparation sessions in partnership with Billingsgate wholesale fish market and training school – due to relocate to Dagenham in the next few years!  
• Food education innovation: We work with a range of partners to offer continuous professional development for local teachers to implement innovative approaches to food education. This includes work to adapt the food technology curriculum to make it more relevant to the borough’s diverse communities, as well as cross-curricular opportunities to use food to reinforce and engage students in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) and personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education.  
• Know Your Onions: We are working with School Food Matters to increase nutritional understanding, build enthusiasm about cooking, gardening and the outdoors, and develop food growing and enterprise skills in local primary and secondary schools. The programme supports students and their teachers to grow vegetables and sell the produce at Barking Market, with proceeds going to a local charity. Participating secondary schools also visit Dagenham Farm to see commercial horticulture in action.