This course has been designed to help you reduce waste in your kitchen and dining room. It will help your catering service to become more efficient and environmentally friendly. It draws on our experience of working with schools to help them run an effective and economic school meal service.
The course is relevant to schools and early years settings that are involved with local authority catering contracts, local catering suppliers or those who run an in house service, employing the school cook and catering staff directly.
Through step-by-step information, this course aims to help you understand:
where waste can occur
- why reducing waste is so important
- why involving the whole school in reducing waste is so important
- tools and techniques for reducing the level of waste within school food.

This course aims to help you:
- understand the Voluntary Food and Drink Guidelines for Early Years Settings in England
- be able to use the Guidelines and practical tools to plan menus for healthy and nutritionally balanced meals and snacks for children aged one to five.
- understand the importance of hydration for children and the types of drinks to provide across the day
- understand appropriate portion sizes for children aged one to five to meet their nutrition needs
- understand how to check menus against the food and drink guidelines
- know where to look for further information.

Through step-by-step information, this course aims to help you:
- understand why it is important to adopt a ‘whole setting’ approach to healthy eating
- be aware of the seven principles that outline national best practice (as outlined in the Children’s Food Trust’s Early Years Code of Practice for Food and Drink) to ensure their approach to food provision encourages children to eat well
- become familiar with tried and tested methods used to adopt a ‘whole setting’ approach to food and drink
- understand how to demonstrate that your setting has an approach to food and drink provision that meets national best practice.
This course is based on the information in sections 5 and 6 of the Voluntary Food and Drink Guidelines for Early Years Settings. The Guidelines have been developed using funding from Government to support early years settings to have a high quality approach to food and drink provision

This course offers step-by-step information and activities to help you:
- understand why a healthy diet is important for children aged one to five years
- develop an understanding of what a healthy diet for children aged one to five years looks like
- identify food and drinks to limit or avoid for children aged one to five years for nutrition or food safety reasons
- understand the differences between young children’s diets and those for older children and adults
- understand where to find up-to-date, evidence-based nutrition information for feeding babies aged under one, and children aged one to five years.
