Exeter Catering College Partnership- Summer 2023

As part of our continued work with Exeter College across all aspects of our Community Work, this Summer we collaborated with the @thirty-four at Exeter College to transform the food provision for our Holiday, Activity and Food participants.

The Holiday, Activity and Food Programme (HAF) is funded by the Department for Education and has been created to provide support to children in receipt of free school meals throughout holiday periods. The programmes include lots of exciting, fun activities, a hot lunch, and the chance to make new friends. This Summer we hosted programmes in North Devon, Willowbrook School, Haven Banks and The Beacon Centre.

Working closely with a nutritional therapist, we delivered workshops to both our primary and secondary school children. The workshops focused on healthy eating and positive diet choices. The sessions were not only aimed at educating the children but also encouraging them to try new foods. They played games where they had to try an anonymous food and describe how it tasted (sweet, sour, texture etc) before guessing what it was. The children were really engaged in this and even those who were fussy eaters wanted to take part and try new foods. They also made smoothies and various other dishes.

To emphasise our aim of promoting healthy eating, we worked with Exeter Catering College @thirty-four (exe-coll.ac.uk) to provide a delicious, appetising, and healthy menu for our HAF participants. The focus was on using healthy, sustainable, and local food in the menu with no processed or artificial ingredients (menus attached). The food was a hit with the children trying food they never had before. This, tied in with the nutritional sessions, demonstrated that the young people were willing to try new foods and eat more healthily.

The impact was that each participant of our programme had access to an exceptionally high standard of nutritious, hot, and delicious food, some of which they may not have tried before. This included hearty homemade desserts, made with natural ingredients. One child on our primary school programme had always refused to eat school dinners and the staff were in awe when one day he ate 3 portions of the lunch.

After such a positive experience, we plan to continue to work with Exeter College in the future and learn from both the successes and challenges of this summer to provide the children with healthy food in the holidays. We are delighted to continue our partnership with Exeter College, who also supported us in subsidising the cost of the meals to make it affordable.