About Home Cooking Skills
Although our partnership with the Jamie Oliver Foundation has ended, we are pleased to announce that our Home Cooking Skills qualification has been extended until December 2024. There have been no changes to the qualification and its content, and you will find that our website pages have been updated to reflect this change, with all new resources and support material.

What are Home Cooking Skills qualifications?

Cooking is an essential life skill, empowering us to make changes that benefit our health and wellbeing. Our Home Cooking Skills courses aim to give every young person the basic skills and knowledge to be able to cook for themselves in a healthy, cost-effective way, as well as gain the confidence to share these skills with friends and family.

Why take Home Cooking Skills?
Learning to cook used to be passed down through the generations, but these days many of us lack the knowledge or skills to cook from scratch. Instead, we rely on pre-prepared or ready-cooked food, a major cause of the obesity epidemic affecting our nation’s health.

This engaging course aims to change all that. 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 help them to make healthy choices throughout their lives.

What will I learn?

You will learn essential knowledge and skills 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 and planning ahead
preparing ingredients and understanding confusing food labels.
How are Home Cooking Skills qualifications structured?

Home Cooking Skills includes two single-unit BTEC qualifications, one at Level 1 and one at Level 2.

Level 1: 4 credits -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.
Level 2: 6 credits- 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.