Your top 10 Food – a fact of life resources

Whether you’re just starting out on your food teaching journey or a classroom veteran, Food – a fact of life has something for you.

In this blog, you’ll find information about our most popular resources, as well as brand new training for 2024!

Read on to find a feast of resources to try in your classroom this year.

Our Eatwell Guide resources are popular all year round, downloaded over 80,000 times last year!

The Eatwell Guide is the UK’s healthy eating model and provides a jumping off point for all nutrition lessons in school.

Our Eatwell Guide resources are designed to support progression in learning about healthy eating from age 3 up to 14 years.

Click on the age group you work with to find the appropriate resources for your pupils: 3-5, 5-7, 7-11 or 11-14 years. 

Sensory evaluation can be a tricky topic for pupils due to the amount of new vocabulary and different evaluation techniques to learn and use.

We have resources available to help! Not only that, but we also have an online training course where you can learn more about why sensory science is used, and how to teach it in the classroom – including examples of all the major sensory tests.

Take a look at the sensory evaluation classroom resources, here:

• Sensory science materials for pupils aged 11-14
• Sensory science materials for pupils aged 14-16

If pupils are struggling to learn terminology, use our Key terms and definitions document - a useful glossary of food and nutrition terms. Perfect for revision!

Our nutrients resources introduce pupils to the important macro and micronutrients – where they can be found and what they can do for our health.

We have resources about nutrients for ages 7 and up. Find them here:

• 7-11 years
• 11-14 years
• 14-16 years

Pupils can also learn about how nutrient requirements change through life with the Nutritional needs through life presentation, a particularly popular resource with teachers of pupils aged 11-14 years!

Good food hygiene and safety practices are vital when planning and running practical food lessons, to keep yourself and your pupils safe.

Keeping your pupils safe in food lessons is your responsibility, and so it is important that risks are mitigated as much as possible. On Food – a fact of life, you can find risk assessment templates that you can adopt and adapt for your classroom. Risk assessments that are uniquely adapted to your food setting can help you to plan safe lessons and provide proof of due diligence, if required.

Templates for risk assessments, as well as other useful materials are available for primary and secondary teachers.

Our free teachers' course, Food spoilage, hygiene and safety is a great way to help you get up to speed with the fundamentals of food hygiene and safety in the classroom, ahead of delivering your lessons. 

You can find links to all our food hygiene and safety resources for ages 3 years and upward, here:

• 3-5 years
• 5-7 years
• 7-11 years
• 11-14 years
• 14-16 years

Our Food poisoning presentation is one of our most downloaded resources!

The Food Curriculum Roadmaps are a visual guide to food and nutrition education for young people aged 3-16 years. They depict what pupils should learn, and in what sequence. The information on the Roadmaps reflects the key facts about what pupils need to know about each topic and at each age.

Roadmaps are available in both print and interactive versions. The interactive versions contain links to the relevant areas on the website, where you and/or your pupils can learn more! Roadmaps are also available in Welsh.

We’ve had over 10,000 downloads of the Roadmaps so far and we’ve been delighted by the great responses they have received.

Teacher Jo Worthington recently wrote a blog for us on why she and her pupils love the Roadmaps! Read Jo's blog and find out how she uses the Roadmaps in her classroom.

View all the Roadmaps here.

Check out the video below for how you can use the Roadmaps:

We have over 400 recipes available on the Food – a fact of life website, including both sweet and savoury dishes from a multitude of cuisines. On our ‘recipes’ tab, you can browse all our recipes, each of which includes a complexity rating, as well as a time estimate, to help you plan your lessons.

You can view the recipes on the website, or download printable Word documents, that you can also edit, if you need to change any ingredients or quantities.

Over 90,000 recipes have been downloaded in the past year!

Our top three recipes (as downloaded by you) are:

1. Spaghetti bolognaise
2. Macaroni cheese
3. Apple and sultana crumble

These three recipes can teach and reinforce important food skills, including weighing, measuring, peeling, knife skills, frying, boiling, grating, grilling, rubbing in and baking. Each recipe on Food – a fact of life lists all of the food skills that pupils will employ when making the dish.

Have you seen our updated Practical food skills videos yet?

The Practical food skills videos are designed to show pupils how to carry out different key food preparation techniques safely and hygienically. They include basic knife skills, how to use key items of kitchen equipment, and how to prepare ingredients for use in recipes.

You can view the entire suite of skills videos on the Food – a fact of life website.

Keep an eye out for brand new videos coming soon!

At Food – a fact of life, we have created a range of interactive quizzes that you can use in the classroom. Based on the online software Kahoot!, pupils can demonstrate their understanding of a lesson using a mobile phone or a tablet to answer questions about the content you have taught them throughout a lesson or a term.

These quizzes encourage pupils to pay closer attention during lessons, as they know that the knowledge of what they have learned will be tested, but in a fun and engaging way, with a competitive angle!

If you aren’t able to use the interactive quizzes (for example, if pupils do not have phones or tablets available), we also have paper-based versions of the quizzes that you can use and adapt as you wish.

Food – a fact of life offers free training all year-round, including online courses, webinars, workshops and conferences. We are proud of our programme and the positive feedback we receive from teachers.

In January, we are delighted to be running a hands-on conference in collaboration with Harper Adams University. Join us in Shropshire for an interactive and engaging day!

You can find out more about all our events on our training page.

As part of their learning journey, pupils need to understand the nutritional values of foods and of the recipes they create. To help, the British Nutrition Foundation has created Explore Food – a free, online nutrition calculator.

Explore Food can be used to analyse the nutritional value of recipes, or to work out the nutritional content of a daily diet. Pupils can save their recipes, or even print out a food label for a dish they have created and analysed.

Your pupils can analyse the recipes that they make in the classroom or at home, to understand more about the nutritional content of their food and the impact of portion size.

In 2022/23, over 240,000 people used Explore Food to calculate a recipe!

Throughout January 2024, we'll be celebrating our most popular Food – a fact of life resources. We’ll be sharing your favourites, and ours, on Twitter (X).

Why not tell us what your favourite Food – a fact of life resource is? Complete our two-minute survey and you might appear in our feed!