Secondary schools and employers in the £8.8 billion East of England food and drink manufacturing industry are being encouraged to form new and stronger links through a work-experience teaching programme that’s been launched by the industry’s skills council.

The Food and Drink Schools Challenge is a free, self-contained teaching programme on interactive CD ROM. It aims to introduce pupils to the world of food and drink manufacturing, which employs 38,000 people in the East of England. It also aims to help employers make an early contribution to tackling the growing recruitment problem faced by the sector because of higher technology demanding higher skills.

“The idea is to make the challenge easily accessible to all secondary schools, and deliverable within school resources,” said Bob Jones, East of England operations manager for Improve, the food and drink sector skills council. “But to enhance the learning experience, we recommend schools and food and drink manufacturers to work together on the challenge, either to have the pupils’ work assessed by the professionals, or perhaps to allow for an inspirational factory visit at the start of the challenge.

“We hope that many secondary schools will apply to the sector skills councils for free CD ROMS, and that many businesses in the region will also obtain them in order to take them along to their local schools by way of forging new links or strengthening existing ones.

“We are certainly calling on employers at the 900 food and drink manufacturing workplaces in the East of England to get involved.  The more that do, the better will be the learning experience in schools, and the better will be the chances of interesting more bright young people in considering a career in food and drink manufacturing, at all kinds of levels and in all kinds of business disciplines.”

The Food and Drink Schools Challenge enables small teams of pupils to work through a six-stage process of designing a new product, manufacturing it, designing and making the packaging, working out the costs and selling price, planning a marketing campaign, and presenting their results at a trade fair.

To allow everything to be done using school resources, the challenge recommends products are selected from a limited range of a sandwich, pizza, smoothie, muffin or breakfast bar.  Total teaching time is estimated at one day.

The interactive CD ROM is available free of charge from Improve, the food and drink sector skills council, email rachael.owen@improveltd.co.uk. For more information visit www.improveltd.co.uk.