Once upon a time I was in secondary school and had to do cookery lessons with everyone else as part of a revolving door scheme of design and technology work. This meant that cooking was only taught for a fraction of the year but it was potentially valuable experience. I say potentially because my cookery lessons did nothing to teach me the very basics of what I needed to get along with ingredients in my own home. A few years later I went to university and had a trial by fire in truly learning how to cook. I feel that this is the reality for many going through "food technology" lessons, so I have to welcome the news today about cookery being made compulsory with mixed emotions

It is, in an objective sense, great news. The idea that kids will be learning about basic ingredients, how to cook basic meals, how to keep a nutritionally balanced diet and do it in a fun and tasty way...all of these things need to be taught to people. With many young adults going to university or just leaving home the necessity to be able to do something as simple as cook spaghetti or chicken and veg can elude them. But herein lies my concerns. Rather than me being able to cook simple meals from the start of my independent life, I resorted to pizza from takeaways, to the Chinese shop up the road, the fish and chip shop. I would dabble in creating my own meals but in reality this would be one of two things for the first year or two of my university life, a sizzle and stir curry with savoury rice, or a spaghetti bolognaise...both cooked to disastrous results to begin with. I persevered with the stressful act of cooking until I got used to it, learning on my feet. How many other people are likely to do the same?

My days cooking at school were filled with making rock buns, scones, soups that were made in such a way that I was put off making them until very recently when I realised that those soups were just the "cheap and nasty" way of making them. We never learned how to cook pasta, we didn't learn how to make a simple healthy sauce, I didn't ever get the chance to actually cook a meal, but I did make biscuits. This is not an unusual situation for our kids to be facing when they turn up to cookery classes. The attitude seems to be that it is more simple to teach how to cook bakery fare, perhaps even more safe given that the ingredients aren't going to give you food poisoning if you get it wrong. But vitally there also seems to be an element of cost involved for the schools that make it hard for them to take the leap to doing the job properly.

Cookers, microwaves, all of the utensils, all of that costs a lot of money. There's also the expectation that the children will bring the ingredients and for some ... that could be difficult.
Clarissa Williams - National Association of Head Teachers

This is the sad reality, until now at least cooking has not been a serious subject and the nation has certainly paid in part for the lack of investment by government. I am beginning to imagine that my school was lucky for having the amount of equipment it had, but we still didn't have enough cooking units to cater for more than 10 or so students at a time, and we certainly didn't have the array of equipment needed to handle, and therefore teach the basics of, multiple pot cooking. Yet the government seems coy on the issue of giving schools what they need to get up to standard on a now compulsory subject. And why exactly should students pay anything for ingredients? Quite aside from the fact that buying the wrong ingredients or different ingredients can mean that following a lesson becomes hard or impossible, and the potential ridicule that may come from not being able to get the ingredient right, I don't see any parents having to fork out money for the radioactive material we're shown in Physics lessons, for the books handed around to learn Shakespeare in English Lit, or for the multitude of chemicals used in Chemistry lessons. Why is it that Cookery stands alone as the only subject where you have to buy your teaching materials yourself?

This is, of course, unless you're deemed poor enough which to me is another separate issue that anyone reading this blog will know I have a particular gripe about. If we can't teach people to use cheap ingredients to make healthy meals then we're setting a bad example, and with vegetable risotto's, simple single portion meals and healthy soups being available to be taught to kids there is absolutely no excuse for anyone to need to be subsidised. It just sends out the message from the beginning of someone's life that eating healthily is something that you can't afford if you're poor so don't bother unless someone is subsidising it for you. Make this slightly political issue go away, Ed Balls, just properly fund the damn subject!

It is a shame that it has taken so long to get to this stage of taking our nations health seriously. The best way to keep healthy is to understand what is unhealthy and how to balance your diet from an early age. As I've said above, however, current practices actually help force people away from a healthy lifestyle, and not funding schools and making students (parents) pay for the ability to learn is just another set of barriers in the way of making this good decision into a great one.

The move is a great start, and I'm happy that we're moving in the right direction, but it's not enough and it's coming about too late in the day to do this in any half measures (excuse the pun). We need independently devised menu's that are flexible to the cultural needs of individual schools, we need the funding to let those menu's, independently assessed to be the best broad learning for a child, be taught properly, and we need to stop perpetuating myths about the cost of food because of a standard line on "means testing". More importantly, with a lack of teachers trained to deliver this course, we need this kind of thinking realised quicker.