About Home Cooking Skills
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What’s it all about?
Home Cooking Skills provides the ideal opportunity to begin teaching cooking skills in your centre, or to accredit teaching that already takes place. The aim of the qualification is to give every young person the basic skills and knowledge to be able to cook for themselves in a healthy and cost-effective way for the rest of their lives, as well as gain the confidence to share these skills with friends and family.
Qualification profile:
- Consists of two single-unit BTEC qualifications at Level 1 and Level 2
- Both qualifications are fully funded on the QCF and contribute to SCAAT points.
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Level 1 |
Contributes to Foundation Learning provision |
Focuses on giving all young people the skills to prepare delicious and nutritious home-cooked food using fresh ingredients, as well as an understanding of the value of passing on cooking knowledge. |
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Level 2 |
6 credits, 23 SCAAT points |
Develops the student’s ability to plan and prepare a series of nutritious home-cooked meals for breakfast, snacks, lunch and dinner, and helps them understand how to cook economically. |
The course consists of over 80 recipes, all divided into manageable sections and covering key topics from eggs and baking to vegetables and quick-cook meats. This is all supported by a range of fact sheets dealing with other basics and essentials such as:
- kitchen basics: what equipment you need and the best way to stock your store cupboard, fridge and freezer
- food safety and hygiene: knife safety, fridge management and rotation
- how to shop cleverly: shopping lists, seasonal food, planning ahead
- preparing ingredients and how to understand confusing food labels.
Easy to teach, enjoyable to learn
Free online teacher support materials accompany the course. They are user-friendly enough for those teachers without a home economics qualification to be able to teach, while at the same time providing exciting content for more experienced teachers and those who already have a good knowledge of food and cooking.
All recipes on the Home Cooking Skills course are by Jamie Oliver and come with step-by-step photography, as well as video support for more complex recipes and 'how-to' style videos showing ingredient preparation. The course also comes with lots of useful fact sheets packed with helpful information to inspire teachers and help with lesson planning. All of this extra content is student-friendly, so it can be used in lessons as well as for planning.
This course is hugely engaging for learners of all cooking abilities. For some, it may be the start of a career in cooking; for others, it will help them to learn the basic skills and recipes that will stand them in good stead throughout their lives.