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PrimaryHealth & Wellbeing

Get A Chef In School To Teach Children Healthy Eating

A chef who is willing to step out of the kitchen and share her expertise can make a real difference to children’s health, and your business

primary@artichokehq.com
by primary@artichokehq.com
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Does your setting’s chef have the X factor? To help you decide, meet Helen Callicott from Great Expectations Nursery in Bristol, who certainly does.

Helen cooks for 70 children every day but still finds the time to interact with them throughout the day in a range of ways, demonstrating that the benefits of having a chef who is passionate about his or her work stretch far beyond the kitchen.

“I don’t feel I’m doing anything other than sharing my love of food – I’m enthusiastic and I suppose that’s infectious for the children,” Helen says. “Good food is about a lot more than being healthy. Eating is a social and emotional occasion, a chance for children to learn how to interact with each other and with adults. It offers huge opportunities for learning, for fun and for children to grow in confidence.”

Helen has been responsible for helping the fussiest eaters to expand the range of foods they’ll eat. Joanne Scott, Great Expectations’ manager, explains: “Helen has such a good rapport with the children; it’s as if they want to please her by eating all their dinner. When she knows a child is struggling with meals, she starts them off on smaller portions and keeps a track of how they’re doing, so she can build up the portions at their pace. Helen also builds a relationship with parents right from the start, so communication about food is a two-way street.”

Good childcare relies on personal relationships and this includes the relationships your chef forms throughout your setting. A chef who is confined to the kitchen all the time has no presence in the setting for staff, children or their parents. In our experience:

• Food is only badly served by childcare staff when the chef isn’t present in the dining room. • Children’s relationship with the chef is different from their relationships with practitioners. The chef is the person who has cooked the food; their role is nurturing, and children want to please the nurturer. • For some children, this will be their only experience of someone cooking a meal from scratch for them – that person should have an identity.

Real food

More than a quarter of UK households don’t possess a dining table. Sales of processed, ready-made food continues to soar. We know there are children who have no concept that meals can be cooked from scratch using fresh ingredients. Early years chefs can help.

“Helen is passionate that the children know where their food comes from,” Joanne says. “She shows the children raw ingredients before they are cooked and combined into meals. Recently they even tried squid! The children are often presented with ingredients like vegetables to make soup; flour, yeast and water to make bread; or minced beef, onion, carrots celery and other vegetables to make a Cottage Pie.”

“Once children understand that eggs come from Chickens and not from Asda, you can go on to teach them that eggs are used to make cakes, omelettes and frittatas and that brushing pastry with egg makes it shiny and crispy,” Helen explains.

Cooking activities

“One important part of the week at Great Expectations is when the children cook with their key worker,” Joanne says. “It might be scones, fruit kebabs, fruit ice lollies or winter vegetable soup. Helen supports the key workers by providing them with recipes, which she designed to teach the children about food and basic cooking. Sometimes there is an element of the nursery tea for the children to prepare too – for instance, Helen makes a dough for breadsticks, which the children eat with their teatime soup.”

“Getting your chef involved in planning cooking activities really helps to underpin their confidence in how they can influence the children,” she adds, “and it’s a wonderful way to build the relationship between chef and practitioners.”

The relationship between chef parents is equally important. “The parents all know Helen,” Joanne says. “She meets them before their children join the nursery, to show them menus and recipes, and talk to them about the nursery’s passion for food.”

Helen has worked with the nursery team to write special leaflets around weaning and fussy eating. These help build parents’ confidence in Helen and the nursery as a whole as experts in children’s food. Newsletters always feature Helen’s recipes, and due to popular demand the recipes have even been made into a book for parents to use at home.”

All these things showcase how much the nursery and Helen value the children’s diet. It’s subtle, but everywhere you look around the nursery, food is valued. The children have something foodie to tell their parents about every day. Parents know from the start that Helen will listen to worries they have about their child’s eating, and will work with them to help their children eat well at nursery and at home.

Great Expectations Nursery didn’t sit down with Helen to form a marketing strategy based on this practice – if they had, it probably wouldn’t have worked. This is the result of a chef who really cares about children’s relationship with food, and nursery owners who recognises the value a good chef brings to their provision. It’s a combination that wins the loyalty of parents and means the nursery runs at full occupancy with a waiting list for places.

If you’d like help with reviewing your setting’s food offer or have your own ‘X factor’ chef, email feedback@grub4life.com

Nigel Denby is a registered dietician and founder of Grub4Life. Browse resource ideas for Healthy Eating Week.

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