Learning recipes for life vital to beating obesity

LONDON – Children’s secretary Ed Balls has announced the next steps in getting children cooking – with measures to get them preparing meals at home and pave the way for compulsory practical classes in secondary schools from 2011.

Mr Balls said it was not just down to schools to teach young people to cook – but that parents needed to be helped and encouraged to teach their children how to prepare meals from scratch.

He confirmed that he is already working with Aldi and Asda, while holding discussions with other major supermarkets, to promote the government’s Real Meals cookbook and get families cooking together – but he said the whole supermarket and food industry had a vital role to play.

Mr Balls said equipping children with basic cooking skills for life was central to combating obesity. Experts say without any intervention, 90 per cent of today’s children could be overweight or obese and at risk from serious diseases by 2050.

He also set out the next steps in training up a new generation of skilled and motivated staff to run practical cooking classes and building top class new facilities – to redress the exodus of home economics teachers when many schools stopped classes in the 1970s and 1980s.

The full £56.3m (NZ$164 million) package is:

• £2.1m (NZ$6.1 million) new investment over the next two years to recruit and train 750 specialist higher-level teaching assistants to help run classes.

• £1.2m (NZ$3.5 million) for a new continuous professional development programme for training 400 existing teachers to teach practical cooking classes – to increase the number of teachers trained to deliver food technology.

• £53m (NZ$154.4 million) for new practical cooking spaces in schools – with £300,000 (NZ$874,000) grants each over the next two years for 170 secondary schools. It is the first tranche of funding from the £150m (NZ$437 million) announced in September 2008 for 515 secondary schools which have no facilities at present – the government is writing to local authorities today to urge them to bid for the remaining schools.

“Teaching children how to prepare basic recipes from scratch is fun to do at school and at home. It helps young people get the skills to go on to cook healthily for life,” said Mr Balls.

“Many adults don’t cook properly or pass on cooking skills to young people – because they feel they don’t have time; have never learnt how; or feel that proper cooking is too expensive. Celebrity chef cookbooks and TV shows have never been more popular but far too many people see cooking as entertainment not something they actually do day-in day-out.

“These measures are vital in gearing up secondary schools to offer practical cooking lessons from 2012 – putting expert and well-trained staff and good facilities in place across the board.

“It is extraordinary that there are still 515 secondaries with no facilities to teaching cooking, including 150 mainly boys-only schools which do not teach cooking at all – that is something our big investment is going to tackle.

“But I’ve always been clear that the onus to pass on cooking skills should not just fall on teachers. This is not about telling families what to do and what to eat. The fact is that if parents never prepare or eat meals together, then we risk children growing up uninterested in cooking or living healthily.

“That’s why we now need to take our Real Meals campaign further. We need supermarkets and the food industry on board to help make learning how to cook properly a normal part of growing up,” said Mr Balls.