What is Food for Life?
Food for Life is a programme about making good food the easy choice for everyone – making healthy, tasty and sustainable meals the norm for all to enjoy, reconnecting people with where their food comes from, as well as learning how it’s grown and cooked, including championing the importance of well-sourced ingredients.
What we offer
Throughout the curriculum at Alfreton Park, we promote healthy choices, independent skills, the love for learning and chances to try new activities. All of this helps to support our school ethos, vision and values.
We offer regular opportunities to take part in horticulture, ensuring that pupil’s plant & care for their homegrown produce, which may also be used in cookery or enterprise projects such as soup, vegetable boxes or pickling. We ensure that our growing is organic, and we have a well-planned growing calendar for over the school year.
Parents have the opportunity to volunteer in our horticulture area, as well as taking part in grow your own bags at home over some of the school holidays. These are provided by the school and may include herbs, cress, flowers etc.
We take a skills-based approach to our cookery lessons with all pupils being able to access the curriculum. The skills are progressive so that by Post 14 some pupils are able to prepare their own meals. A wide range of foods are prepared, encouraging nutritious options using home grown or locally sourced produce.
We also offer work experience opportunities and offsite visits to local farms; this helps to teach us where our produce comes from, including meat and dairy.
During lunchtime pupils have a variety of choices, lunchtime is relaxed with all pupils having the opportunity to sit down and enjoy their meal, as well as working with our catering team to ensure that food waste is managed effectively.
In the future
We plan to create our own cookery book using widget symbols with all our favourite recipes in.
We are also making connections with local schools to share our enthusiasm and skills, linked to Food for Life. This will also help to promote inclusion and pupil wellbeing.
We are hoping to invite local businesses into the school to inform us about how foods are produced, e.g., bread.
