Education
and Training
Case Studies
Kent County Council
The issue: One third of the food we buy ends up being thrown away. The government's 'Love Food Hate Waste' campaign is trying to combat this issue by encouraging people to shop and cook more smartly in order to reduce their waste.
The challenge: Kent County Council tasked Waste Watch with developing a programme to educate young people (5-11) about food waste, and how to prevent it. We needed to pack the campaign's' key messages into a short space of time; make the programme as appealing for an 11 year old as it was for a 5 year old; and most importantly, we had to make sure the performance was loads of fun so the audience would understand how and why to take action on reducing food waste!
Our approach: Our education team worked with a professional actor to develop a 45 minute school theatre performance presented by Gordon le Rotter, an eccentric French chef, and his sidekick Pierre, the puppet. Gordon and Pierre cooked up a storm, sang songs and encouraged lots of audience participation to get young people and their households to make waste-free cooking, shopping and food storage choices. The programme is touring primary schools in Kent.
The results: The Gordon le Rotter show was seen by 12,800 young people at 61 primary schools. Questionnaires showed a very high retention rate of key messages and in over three quarters of schools, all the pupils said they had enjoyed the performance. Before the performance, an average of 62% of pupils thought wasting food was bad, after the performance this figure went up to 92%.
72% of teachers rated the show's educational content as 'very good'.
"This was an excellent presentation which I would recommend to any other school. It was well rehearsed, engaging, big and bold. Thank you so much, an excellent 45 minutes".
Miss Tutthill, St. Joseph's Catholic Primary School, Dover.