A NEW head chef at Pokesdown Community Primary School is providing restaurant quality school meals for the children.

Chef Russ Ball has built a small kitchen in the school and is producing freshly-made school meals for the children on a daily basis.

Like many schools, Pokesdown originally served the children pre-made food and only had the kitchen facilities for reheating.

Now the children are enjoying home-cooked food made by two chefs with 40 years of high level experience.

Russ said: “The main thing for us is we know what we put in it, for some of our children this is the only nutritious meal they will have in the day, so it’s very rewarding cooking for them.”

The children enjoy a range of restaurant quality dishes including vegan gnocchi, butternut risotto, fish tacos, aubergine parmigiana and desserts such as apple flapjacks, berry meringue mousse and pear crumble.

Russ works alongside fellow chef Matt Stewart on site to make more than 200 meals each day.

Russ also caters for the children’s dietary needs with vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free and fish-based options.

Headteacher Ali Bayliss said: “Lots of parents have emailed in saying their children are trying things they wouldn’t have tried previously and we’ve been asked for recipes, so we want to get a recipe book going for parents at home.

“In the first week the school cooked about 140 meals and now they are cooking 290 a day so it has really gone from strength to strength, and we’ve found that the children have a lot more energy throughout the day.”

The school is one of the first schools outside of London to be working with the charity Chefs in Schools, which helped them find their two new chefs. The next step is to bring the food education to the classrooms.

Mrs Bayliss said: “We want them to develop that skill of food prep and cooking to take forward to secondary school but also as a future life skill.”

Plans for a ‘school of food’ within the grounds are in the pipeline, where they hope to build a kitchen garden for the children to learn how their food is grown and harvested.

The school is looking for local businesses or individuals in the community that may be interested in helping.

Email office@pokesdowncommunity.co.uk