Last week, we launched a new guide What’s Cooking in Scotland? Part Three at our cooking skills learning exchange in Edinburgh. Around 40 people attended this, many of whom are running cooking courses within community and voluntary sector organisations in low-income communities.

The new guide provides tools and ideas to help you think in more detail about issues such as:

• How your cooking skills courses might ‘work’, and how some activities you do on your courses might work for some people more than others.
• It encourages you to think about how people might react or respond (positively and negatively) to what you do on a course and how you can adapt what you do to meet their needs and wishes better.
• The guide also includes information on how to evaluate cooking courses

Those attending our learning exchange took part in activities to think through a few ideas from the guide, such as:

• the difference between targeting and tailoring course activities
• the challenges and benefits of participants eating together at the end of cooking sessions verses encouraging them to take the food home.

My colleague Jacqui McDowell also ran activities to help people think about how to make sure their evaluation tools or methods (such as questionnaires or observation notes) actually tell them if courses have made the difference to participants that they hoped they would make. Or, in other words, do your evaluation tools actually gather the information you need to show the course has met its outcomes?

We will come back to what else we did and learnt at the learning exchange in later blog posts.

Kim.newstead@nhs.net