Chartwells Brings Food Education Home

With home-schooling now being implemented across the nation, Chartwells, Compass’ education business, is doing everything it can to support children and young adults, alongside their families and schools.

The Chartwells team of Nutritionists and Chefs have been working with CBBC celebrity Chef and Leon co-founder Allegra McEvedy MBE and their own Executive Chef, Andrew Walker, to create interactive cook-along demonstration videos to keep children entertained and give them inspiration for some healthy snacks.

Allegra says: “Engaging children and young adults in cooking, and showing them how much fun they can have in the kitchen is my absolute driver in life. We will help fill these long days of lockdown with some light educational messages about where food comes from, seasonality and nutrition….all against the backdrop of making some fun and yummy recipes. We are Open for Business with a menu that’s got something for everyone!”

Alongside the video content, which will be hosted on YouTube, Chartwells has created a bank of supporting materials, including lesson plans, recipe cards and a self-care challenge, which gives children something to aim for each day, to support with home schooling.

Charlie Brown, MD Chartwells says: “During these unprecedented times, our teams wanted to support the young people we serve every day. We’ve used our expertise to offer some inspiration, alongside education and we really hope this goes some way to helping the people we work with.”

This work is alongside Chartwells’ dedicated health and wellbeing programme ‘Beyond the Chartwells Kitchen’, which aims to help young people, teachers and communities tackle issues like childhood obesity, mental ill health and lack of exercise.

Chartwells is the leading school food provider in the UK serving over 2000 schools. During this crisis the team have kept the majority of school kitchens open for hot food feeding key worker children, and have also been providing nutritious packed lunches or home hampers for those entitled to free school meals.