Washingborough Academy

Washingborough Academy is a primary school comprising of 300 children aged 3-11. There are 34 staff at the school.
At Washingborough Academy we pride ourselves on our positive relationships. We treat each other with mutual respect and work in a climate where openness and inclusion lay the foundations for our values to be built upon. Underpinning all our work at Washingborough Academy is our values based curriculum, which allows both the children and staff to work closely together to develop a strong educational philosophy valuing the individual, the community and the environment.

Food education and healthy lifestyles are incredibly important to us as a school. Each class cooks once a week and we are proud of how adventurous and skilled our young chefs become! As well as this, we also have a Snack Shack where, each week, a group of children prepare a healthy snack that is then sold a break time on a Wednesday. This not only provides our children with healthy food, it also enables them to learn fundmental likfe skills and develop an excellent awareness of food and the food choices they will make.

Washingborough Academy is a lead school in Food Education in the country. We are the only in house school caterer in the UK to hold the prestigious Soil Association Gold Award and provide our children with outstanding, freshly prepared food on a daily basis. Our menus celebrate locally sourced, seasonal ingredients which, in itself, has encouraged support from and forged strong links with local businesses and farms having our own chef mean we are able to build purposeful curriculum links across the school through themed menus which link closely with the learning curriculum, reinforcing and further supporting the learning in the classroom.

The school is also the pioneer of TastEd, which is a sensory food based approach to learning based on the SAPERE method. We have also installed a wood-fired pizza oven, where the children make the dough for their pizzas and use produce from the garden for their toppings. We have created a Heritage Orchard comprising 22 Lincolnshire varieties of apple and also the creation of raised vegetable beds for all key stages. This has meant that our children from the age of 3, right up to when they leave the school at 11, are learning how their food grows, where it is sourced and how to cook it. We have also employed our own gardener and have extended our growing areas (each class have their own vegetable beds) so that we can provide more of our own fruit and vegetables to our commercial kitchen. We have just created a 1000m² Kitchen garden within the grounds to provide fruit and vegetables for our School Kitchen and Food education lessons as well as a large polytunnel.

Due to the work that we have done around children’s diet and healthy choices, we were chosen to be a case study school for the UK governments Childhood Obesity Plan: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/childhood-obesity-plan-case-studies . The headteacher, who has a doctorate in Food Education and School Leadership, has spoken at various national and international conferences in the UK, Norway, China, Iceland and Sweden and was awarded the Schools Food Plan Award in 2016 in recognition of the work he has done with School Food and awarded the Caroline Walker Trust ‘Food Hero of the Year’ 2019.