Cover feature
FOOD AND NUTRITION SUCCESS
‘The children love cooking healthy dishes in the food tech space we funded’
Claire Gibson, former deputy chair, St Andrew’s CofE Primary School PTFA, Clacton-on-Sea, Essex (202 pupils)
We’re a small village school, but we have quite a few deprived families in our community. Once a week, we have a food bank, with produce set up on a table at the front of the school. We often give away fruit and vegetables that the children have grown themselves in the school allotment – something the PTFA funded a few years ago. A while back, we started thinking
how great it would be if the kids could not only grow their own food but cook it too, so they could learn how to make freshly prepared, healthy meals. When we talked to the school, we discovered that the only food tech equipment they had was a portable two-ring hob that had to be wheeled from classroom to classroom, which wasn’t great! There was a small staff kitchen that was hardly ever used, so we asked if we could turn it into a new food tech space for the kids. We really wanted the children to be able to get out of the classroom into a dedicated area where they could learn about cooking.
We raised funds for the project
with weekly ice cream sales in the summer and a massive raffl e at Christmas. The raffl e raised almost £1,000, and my employer Barclays match funded that amount. I did a lot of the initial labour
myself in the summer holidays, ripping out the old kitchen units and pulling up the fl ooring. Then we put a call-out to parents on Classlist. Luckily we have a lot of tradespeople in our school community and some came forward to help. One parent put us in touch with their friend who is a builder. He knocked down a partition wall and did some plastering for us at minimal cost. A dad who’s an electrician took out the old light fi ttings and put in motion-sensor lights, while one of the granddads offered to fi t the kitchen for us and donated the tiles and a sink.
We bought the rest of the kitchen
from Howdens, who kindly threw in two ovens for free when we explained our project to them. Our local Asda community champion was also amazing – she donated all the kitchen utensils and even offered to come in and give the kids a healthy-eating talk and make fruit kebabs with them. When the project was fi nished,
we invited reps from all the companies that had helped us to come in and bake cupcakes with the kids. The cupcakes had green butter icing to match the school colours and sprinkles on top. Since the food tech kitchen has opened, the kids have enjoyed being able to get out of the classroom and do something hands on. A lot of the SEN kids, in particular, fi nd it really therapeutic. It’s defi nitely helped the children
It’s helped the children to realise that meals don’t have
to come in a plastic container from the supermarket
understand where their food comes from, and to realise that meals don’t have to come in a plastic container from a supermarket. They now do things like make their own pasta sauces from carrots and tomatoes that they’ve grown themselves in the allotment or cook potatoes that they’ve just dug up, and they fi nd it really rewarding.
School Fundraising AUTUMN 2025 15
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