2010Culinary Schools Information

• 1 . Scottish Hospitality Students Receive Hardship and Scholarship Fund

• The Hospitality Industry Trust (HIT) Scotland has announced a £100,000 bursary fund to help hospitality and catering students at Scottish colleges and universities.
  A total of 28 hospitality and catering course providers have access to a new bursary scholarships scheme to reward promising students plus an annual hardship fund, which has helped nearly 10,000 students over the past 16 years.
  The bursary scholarships have been introduced to broaden the horizons of Scottish students.

• 2 . Food safety qualifications launched to avoid kitchen blunders

• National qualification provider NCFE has launched two new food safety qualifications to help develop and ensure best practice in the catering industry.
  NCFE’S newly launched Level 2 Award in the Principles of Practical Food Safety for Catering and its Level 3 Award in the Principles of Practical Food Safety Supervision for Catering, are designed to ensure best practice and optimum health and safety procedures when handling and serving food.
  Learners can benefit from developing the skills and knowledge needed to enter the hospitality and catering sector and are also ideal for those already employed in the industry who wish to gain a nationally recognised qualification.
  Courses explore the methods of storage, preparation, cooking, handling and serving food safely, in line with good practice and food safety legislation. Units also cover the importance of risk assessment and pest control within catering environments.
  The Level 3 Award additionally teaches the skills required for supervisory roles, such as food safety management procedures, monitoring good hygiene practice, training staff, communication and ensuring compliance and implementation of legislation and procedures.
  Learners who achieve the new qualifications can progress onto further courses, such as Level 2 and 3 qualifications in Hospitality and Catering.
  Visit www.ncfe.co.uk for more information.

• 3 . A bigger school food policy

• The latest figures released on the take-up of school meals in England made disappointing reading both for the government and for those directly responsible for school catering. More worrying though were the warnings that the strict nutrition content guidelines now extended to secondary schools will only make things harder, reducing choice and adding to the decline.
  None of us can argue that high nutritional standards and sustainable procurement are not the right way to go but the “healthier option” label is of little incentive if the pupils do not like the food and the variety on offer is diminished by adherence to the rules.
  Despite the abundance of guidance aimed at catering managers and governing bodies, some food manufacturers are now arguing that many schools do not have the scope or skills to address the whole life sustainability of their meal provision without compromising the quality. One manufacturer, the Manchester Rusk Company (MRC), believes it is the suppliers, producers and manufacturers who should now be taking the lead.
  “It is not just about educating the buyers and catering staff that to achieve longer term, whole life value for money, food procurement needs to be sustainable” explained Stewart Niven Commercial Controller of MRC. “We believe that it is up to us as manufacturers to prove our products are nutritionally, environmentally and financially viable in order to simplify the procurement and menu design system for the schools and provide meals that the children want to eat.”
  The difficulty for MRC is that how meat is reared and gets to the table is a far more auditable narrative than the production, processing and transport impact of the sauces and seasonings that hold a meal together. In the wealth of guidance available there is little advice to manufacturers on their responsibilities as part of the supply chain and schools do not have the resources to undertake a detailed and time consuming analysis.
  Both the Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative and the Sustainable Schools Initiative have put enormous pressure on schools to demonstrate that their food procurement is in line with official policy. But the “sustainability” of food is notoriously complex and difficult to measure and many schools do not have the resources to police their own supply chains. Reconciling efficiency and sustainability in school catering cannot be managed without support from manufacturers providing products that already take account of environmental, social and economic factors.