Vocational Catering – Enterprise
This year students will again run a “Lunch club”, organising various foods to sell to customers who come in to a café type scene where tables are set and the students perform different tasks to serve them there food and drinks.
Vocational Catering offers meals such as; soups and breads, casseroles and stews, Christmas all the trimmings Turkey barm, salads, stir fry, homemade burgers and foods from around the world, Italian, Chinese, Ireland, Spain, France, American and British.
This all helps students with building up there confidence and self-esteem. They all work as part of a team, follow all instructions given to them and follow Health and Safety within a food Industry.
Vocational Catering is run like a business Enterprise, where students take part in marketing, banking, budgeting, and using an Internal ordering system for all produce.
Following making and cooking foods for lunch club, students also have to keep up with the clearing and washing of all pots and equipment and also load all aprons and cloths in to the washing machine and switch on. This all helps teach those Independent Living Skills.
Horticulture
Horticulture is a very rewarding experience for the students. It gives them the opportunity of growing, creating, maintaining flowers and vegetables. Benefiting and improving fine motor skills, enhancing creativity, increasing social skills and improves self-confidence.
The course has a busy schedule with various seasonal enterprise projects such as winter hanging baskets, bulbs and wreaths, spring bulbs, setting vegetables and seeds for the great summer plant sale and summer hanging baskets.
The students have real life experience of visiting the wholesalers to buy goods at cost and to work alongside the community using their facilities.
There is also something to do indoors or outdoors if you choose this vocational pathway.
Wood work Skills
The enterprise is located off the college site in a small industrial estate in Leek and this helps to give the student a “feel” of going to work. Experienced tutor in woodwork supervises students making garden furniture and bird products, which sell at the college shop “Crafty Corner”.
The goods range from Bug Houses at £2, Bird nesting boxes at £5, Twin seats at £100 and picnic tables at £180. We supply local pubs and schools with outdoor furniture and bird products for wild gardens, Derbyshire Wildlife Trust with bird box kits for school education projects, local communities with furniture and planters and even Leek and Buxton Colleges with outdoor seating.
The unit has a well-equipped woodwork shop with tools that are adaptable to meet student’s needs, a teaching area with computers for student course work and a small kitchen area to help teach life skills like basic meal and drinks preparation, a washing machine to wash aprons and clothes.
The students take pride in the products that they help to make and this helps to build self-esteem, working as part of a team, following instructions and Health and Safety in the workplace.
We cater for the colleges 16-25 yr old students and run a school’s link programme with local schools to help introduce potential students to college life to support the transition from school to college.
Pottery
Students make a range of handmade pottery items that are produced both at Leek and Buxton campuses. All of the work is available for sale and is sold through the Crafty corner shop throughout the year at Leek. At Buxton the learners make work on a seasonal theme that is sold through craft sales on the spark kart in the college at Christmas, Easter and summer.
A range of handmade items are produced using traditional techniques including slip casting, press moulding and clay modelling. All of the work produced is hand crafted, decorated and glazed ready for sale by the students. Students undertake a range of projects throughout the year using a wide range of techniques and materials. Students are encouraged to make personal choices with their work and to develop their own creativity, within the brief for the sale.
As part of the enterprise element, students weigh the work they have produced and calculate cost prices for each product. The students then go on to create a retail price list for each sale. As part of the sale for the products learners are encouraged to take part in preparing their work for sale – organising wrapping, transporting the work, displaying the work for sale. On sale day learners run the sale conversing with the buying public, getting to handle money and giving change in return.
As part of the course learners complete an enterprise workbook, where they learn about marketing, costing products and developing working processes. Learners keep a weekly log where they record their activities each week and are able to give personal feedback on the work they are producing.
