The Focus on Food Campaign is all about cooking. Cooking is a basic life skill which all children deserve to be taught well throughout their school life. Unless children learn to cook they cannot successfully make healthy eating choices or take full control of their lives.

Established in 1998, the Focus on Food Campaign is the leading practical food education and outreach programme in the UK. It is a campaign to raise the profile and importance of food education and help secure, sustain and strengthen the status of food in primary and secondary schools nationally, and in the wider community.

Focus on Food inspires and enables young people to cook and trains teachers, youth and community group leaders and health professionals to teach young people how to select, prepare and cook healthy food.

It carries out practical training aboard its flagship mobile cooking classrooms – the Cooking Buses. They tour schools and community groups throughout the year teaching vital cooking skills alongside nutrition, healthy eating and an appreciation of good food and where it comes from.

Focus on Food has been working with the Helen Hamlyn Trust since 2004 to develop the cookit strand within Open Futures. cookit works closely with growit giving children the opportunity to make delicious food from ingredients they have grown themselves. Focus on Food project officers work in schools to train teachers and to nurture their developing confidence which is soon passed on to children, parents and volunteers.

cookit engages children with hands-on experience of preparing their produce for the table, thereby developing a positive food culture and providing a good culinary understanding of how the food they grow in school relates to their own physical development and well-being.

To find out more about the Focus on Food Campaign and its work with schools and young people, visit the Focus on Food website.