First experience of a Food for Life Partnership awards ceremony
We are pleased to have so many people coming forward to guest blog on our Tumblr page. Our latest post is from Rob Percival who joined the Food for Life Partnership head office team in June. His role is local programme coordinator. To find out first-hand how schools achieve their FFLP awards, he went along to last week’s regional award ceremony in Calderdale, one of the areas where the FFLP programme has been commissioned by the local authority to work with schools. Here’s his report:
I visited William Henry Smith School in Brighouse last week, where schools in Calderdale were awarded their bronze, silver, and gold awards for providing healthy, fresh school meals and the growing, cooking, and farm visit activities they have undertaken as part of the Food for Life Partnership.
Five schools attended the event, with delegations of pupils, teachers and catering staff. Pupils were treated to an ‘aquaponics’ display by Incredible Edible of Todmorden, a cooking lesson by Health Education Trust, and a buffet lunch that was prepared by the catering staff at William Henry Smith School, using local organic Calderdale produce.
A pupil from William Henry Smith School accepted a silver certificate on behalf of the school. He described some of the activities pupils had been involved in as part of the Food for Life Partnership, including cooking lessons and growing vegetables. Pupils at the school enjoy fresh and seasonal meals, with meat and fish sourced from sustainable sources, and even get to eat eggs from the school hens. He said that the school was looking forward to starting to work towards the gold award.
Pupils from Ferney Lee Primary, Greetland Academy, and Barkisland Primary accepted bronze awards on behalf of their schools, and described the different activities they were involved in at each of their schools: from chopping onions to visiting local farms, tracing the meat in their school dinners back to the farm where it was reared, and growing vegetables in the school garden. Ravenscliffe school were awarded the prestigious gold award. Tony Mulgrew, the catering manager at the school, emphasised that the journey to achieve the award has involved hard work, but that it was absolutely worth it, as the Food for Life Partnership was achieving such exciting results in Calderdale.
I am new to the Food for Life Partnership, having just started to work for the team a couple of weeks ago. I was struck by the diversity of activities that schools were involved in, and how proud pupils and staff alike were to have
