The Improvement Foundation is one of seven partners supporting the establishment of Let's Get Cooking clubs by the national School Food Trust.

Let's Get Cooking is a five-year, £20 million Big Lottery Fund programme to set up a network of 5,000 cookery clubs across England. We are calling our approach Everyone's Cooking.

The Everyone's Cooking programme is aimed at improving the food preparation and cooking skills of children, their family members and members of their local community in order to increase healthy eating, reduce obesity and prolong life.

Using the skills, experience and knowledge of our Healthy Communities Collaborative team, our remit is to engage and involve communities to set up and deliver the clubs, and sustain them into the future.

There is a widely acknowledged recognition that two generations of people have missed out on developing their cooking skills, but that local communities continue to retain this knowledge amongst their older residents. By bringing these people together with professionals from health and education, they can support parents and children in learning new skills and increasing their knowledge of food and health.

The five-year programme has three targets:

• Over one million children, family members and members of the local community will increase their food preparation or cooking skills as a result of Let's Get Cooking
• 70% of participants who learn a new healthy eating skill through Let's Get Cooking will replicate that skill at home
• 50% of children, young people and families who participate in Let's Get Cooking will increase their intake of nutritionally healthy food

The Healthy Communities Collaborative has experience of working in communities across the country on widening access to a healthier diet. This has involved local people and professionals combining their resources and learning, to improve people's knowledge of, and access to, healthy eating.

The national policy on healthy living is set out on the Department of Health's website.

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Who is involved

The initial focus is to engage with five secondary schools in Liverpool and to target their feeder primaries as part of the wider community. After the first year of the programme, the learning will then be spread and adapted to four other English regions.

What we are doing

Local people are at the centre of our approach, so the Everyone's Cooking clubs will be run by community members, including service providers with responsibility for and an interest in the health and well-being of children. The outcomes will be the same as those of the Let's Get Cooking clubs.

The main focus for the clubs is to teach basic cooking skills to children and parents, and to ensure that participating schools fully benefit from being part of the project. In school, the headteacher will have overall responsibility for activities connected with the clubs.

The Improvement Foundation will encourage and ensure community engagement, provide a handbook to guide and inform participants, and demonstrate a model for sustainability with partnership working at its core, which can be transferred to other settings.