This is an integral part of the curriculum at The Gateway School developing life skills, social skills and promoting independence. In KS3 we follow programmes such as Licence to cook and ‘Active Kids Get Cooking’.

We also explore and make a wide range of dishes following cross curricular links with the Humanities department in our historical and cultural cooking which is proving very popular with our students.

In KS4 we offer BTEC qualifications (Home Cooking Skills Level 1 and Level 2). They are hands-on courses that help our students develop the essential skills they need to cook simple, nutritious, affordable food.

The Level 1 qualification focuses on giving our students the skills to prepare delicious and nutritious home-cooked food, using fresh ingredients as well as an understanding of where the ingredients they use comes from and the value of passing on cooking knowledge.

The level 2 qualification expands on this and develops our students’ ability to plan and prepare a series of nutritious home cooked meals for breakfast, snacks, lunch and dinner and helps them understand how to cook economically.

We also do Friday projects which we link into our termly themes such as enterprise projects in which we have made a considerable contribution to charity events with our cake sales. The students have also used the skills they have learnt to plan, prepare and make the food for parent events which has been a credit to them and a real success.