An innovative founder of a food charity has been recognised in national awards for learning outside the classroom.
Stephanie Wood, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of School Food Matters (SFM), has been shortlisted in the Innovator category in the national Awards for Outstanding Contribution to Learning Outside the Classroom (LOtC).
The awards are presented annually by the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom (CLOtC) and recognise those people who have had a significant impact on the lives of children and young people through their commitment to providing exciting and inspiring learning outside the classroom (LOtC) opportunities.
Nine years ago, Stephanie was a parent perplexed by the school food offered to her two small children: frozen food, unappealing, and quite often unidentifiable. Upon hearing a head teacher declare that children at his primary school couldn't identify an onion, let alone know what to do with it, Stephanie immediately knew that there was a job to be done.
In order to address the problem, Stephanie founded the charity School Food Matters (SFM) with the mission to ensure that every child enjoys fresh, sustainable food at school and understands where their food comes from.
SFM works with parents, children, caterers, policy makers, and schools to improve school meals and develop innovative food education programmes that break down the traditional barriers of the school classroom and get children involved in cooking, growing, and farm visits.
Much of the work Stephanie spearheads encourages children to grow their own fruit and vegetables at school, learn to make various food items with those ingredients and often includes enterprise opportunities where the children can then sell their food products at local markets. Students are further engaged by getting them out into the countryside.
Through SFM, Stephanie teaches children about the provenance of their food by taking them to working farms across the UK where students meet farmers, pick their own fruits and vegetables, and get a chance to understand where their food actually comes from.
The food education programmes managed by Stephanie and her team at SFM have reached tens of thousands of children and have given them priceless opportunities to learn about their food and the world around them outside of the traditional classroom setting.
