Restaurateur Oliver Peyton certainly thinks so, even going so far as to claim that, ‘Catering colleges are basically a stop-off before you're sent to prison. They're a disgrace.’ Predictably, this has set off a storm of protest, but this is an issue that directly links with the government’s skills agenda and to the economy, given the importance of international and domestic tourism.

Peyton’s main gripe is that colleges are so bad that, ‘there aren’t enough good chefs around’. So short that Peyton and his fellow judges on The Great British Menu, Prue Leith (Chair of the School Food Trust) and Matthew Fort, spent a great deal of time praising the sixteen contestants and UK cookery in general.

Should anyone take Peyton’s criticisms seriously? Aside from having no formal food or catering qualifications himself (he studied textiles at Leicester Polytechnic), Peyton’s pretensions as a cultural commentator were on full show when he recently addressed the Horticultural Trades Association conference in Oxford. In his speech he urged garden centre owners to boycott Coca Cola, saying, ‘it's a disgusting drink and it rots your insides. Smoke and take heroin instead’.

While he may be a fierce critic of catering colleges, we know of none whose kitchens have been closed by environmental health inspectors. Rather than banging on about the educational failures of colleges, Peyton should perhaps invest more time and money in basic hygiene training for his own staff after Westminster Council in 2006 order the Inn the Park closed because of ‘a serious infestation of mice and poor maintenance of routine cleaning resulting in actual, and a significant risk of, food contamination’.

British food and cooking have improved vastly over the last 20 years. While there may be issues with catering colleges not being of the same standard as their continental counterparts, the real proof is in the pudding, with the 2005 Egon Ronay guide saying British gastropubs were better than most French bistros. Heston Blumenthal’s 3 Michelin star restaurant, The Fat Duck, has just given a two-month work placement to a Deeside College catering student.

So what has Peyton achieved? His comments have reinforced the idea that college and training are for failures, and yet seems to have no idea (or perhaps no desire) about how to improve matters.
www.bbc.co.uk/food/tv

www.deeside.ac.uk

www.innthepark.com