Love of Food: Students get to cook from school to work at Ballina High School

Students will complete training at the RSL, and then chefs from the club will attend classes at the school, to offer extra insights and share their experience.

Students at Ballina Coast High School will benefit from a memorandum of understand signed between the school and the Ballina RSL.

High school students will enjoy special access to new work opportunities thanks to a new program called Love of Food.

Ballina RSL Club and Ballina Coast High School (BCHS) signed a memorandum of understanding on June 1 that will include a hospitality scholarship program and a mentoring program for local hospitality students.

The Love of Food program seeks to establish workplace partnerships, a scholarship to support targeted students as well as mentor partnerships.

Students will complete training at the RSL Club, supporting specific events and learning, and then chefs from the club will attend classes at the school, to offer extra insights and share their experience.

The program will explore opportunities in all areas of the club from the kitchen, functions and events, purchasing, retail, and business services.

Chef Susan Tulloch, the Head of Hospitality at BCHS, said the students learn at a state-of-the-art kitchen.

“These kids like to be active, they really like workplace activities, and when they come back they always say how much they enjoyed it,” she said.

“But it’s vitally important while they get the skills that they see a pathway to work, and have the experience needed here at school.”

Mrs Tulloch said around 80 students, aged 16 to 18, were currently in the hospitality program at BCHS.

“They are learning that their career opportunities are not just about working in the kitchen, they can work in front of house, back of house, photographers, there is event co-ordinating, there is management, but they need to start somewhere and this is where their career start,” she explained.

Students at Ballina Coast High School with Principal Janeen Silcock, Ballina RSL CEO Bill Coulter and the school's Head of Hospitality, Susan Tulloch.

Bill Coulter, chief executive of the Ballina RSL Club, said the program was great opportunity for his organisation.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to partner with the students in their education path in hospitality,” he said.

“The club has some really highly skilled chefs that will work with the students in our premises and at the school in their kitchen facilities, and offer the kids some real life experience next to a real executive chef, for example.

“That rounds their education very nicely, and it’s a great outcome for hospitality in the Northern Rivers, which it’s being challenged with staffing resources at the present time,” he said.