Educaterers win Business of the Year!
Congratulations to Educaterers, Warwickshire County Council’s school catering Local Authority Traded Company (LATC), who have brought home the Lead Association for Catering in Education (LACA) ‘Business of the Year’ Award to Warwickshire!
The Business of the Year award recognises catering teams or organisations that have made an outstanding contribution to catering for schools in their local area and who continue to make a real difference to education catering.
The LACA Awards, which reward good management, strong performances and high achievements, were announced at a black tie ceremony at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole on 11th July, with members of the Educaterers team picking up the award.
Educaterers was the first local authority service in Warwickshire to be set up to run as an LATC, around 18 months ago, having formerly been Warwickshire County Caterers.
Many of Warwickshire County Caterers existing 700 workforce became Educaterers’ employees and the company has been focused on making sure that staff are given recognition for good work.
Since the change, Educaterers have been winning new contracts, including two from outside the county council’s catchment area in Oxford and Birmingham. It provides some 125,000 school meals a week.
The first 18 months of Educaterers’ operation have also seen three centres of excellence at three individual schools established, a secondary, junior and infant school, to further improve the cookery skills of Educaterers’ staff.
Over 75% of what Educaterers put on school dinner plates is homemade and that requires giving staff a greater set of skills.
The centres of excellence allow Educaterers to train both new and existing employees, as well as test-drive new ideas in service and menu development.
Eleven Educaterers employees from across Warwickshire have just passed the first Culinary Skills course to be run at their new Centre of Excellence at Boughton Leigh Junior School in Rugby (see full story), so congratulations and well done to them.
Leamington LAMP win new Award
Local alternative education provider, Leamington LAMP, has won Educational Supporter of the Year at this year’s Education Awards. As well as the Award itself, LAMP will have the opportunity to work with the category sponsor, the National Energy Hub, on a project that will be screened at next year’s awards ceremony.
Director, Timothy Ellis said ‘LAMP will continue to champion the arts and innovation as it builds its diverse education offer, credit for this award goes to our fabulous, hard-working staff and students.’
For this first time, the event is partnered with the Pearson Teaching Awards, with all category winners automatically entered into the televised ceremony, which will air later this year on BBC 2’s Classroom Heroes.
Accepting the award on LAMP’s behalf, Director Pip Burley said ‘We are hugely proud of our students for continuing to overcome barriers and succeed in a world that can make it hard for neurodiverse people.’
Leamington LAMP is a specialist arts education centre for young people with autism and high anxiety. They run courses in Music, Art, Photography, Theatrical make-up, Maths, English, Japanese and Computer Games Development.
Pictured: National Energy Hub Sponsor with Pip Burley, Leamington LAMP Director
Top marks for school caterers
School catering staff in Warwickshire have been recognised for their top notch cookery skills following the completion of an innovative new training course run by Educaterers.
Our school catering Local Authority Traded Company (LATC) recently launched their Culinary Skills training programme at their new Centre of Excellence at Boughton Leigh Junior School in Rugby.
Eleven new and existing Educaterers employees from across Warwickshire passed the first course to be run at the centre with flying colours and were each presented with a certificate, a ‘Star Baker’ apron and a bottle of Prosecco at their ‘graduation’, which was followed by a celebratory afternoon tea.
They were trained by skilled chef Julie Murray, an Assistant Development Manager at Educaterers.
Food craft modules on the programme included artisan bread baking, food preparation and cooking for a healthy diet, knife skills with fruit and vegetable preparation, creative cakes, cookie dough and traybakes, and perfect pastry.
The training programme has been designed to upskill and refresh employees’ knowledge and to give staff the skills they need to take their new ideas and talents back to their school kitchens and dining rooms.
The training is open to all Educaterers employees, and staff can choose to do anything from just one to all six of the sessions.
Educaterers believes strongly in developing its catering teams’ expertise. As well as offering the Culinary Skills programme, the new Centre of Excellence at Boughton Leigh Junior School has been created to showcase the best of what Educaterers does and to test new ideas in both catering service and menu development.
Educaterers provide over 120,000 school meals every week to over 200 schools across Warwickshire, Birmingham and Oxfordshire. For more information visit www.educaterers.co.uk.