Kitchen nightmares - teachers scramble for a hospitality solution

The Maitland Grossmann High School students were completing the practical parts of their Hospitality course at Maitland Gaol's commercial kitchen when it closed suddenly due to safety concerns in March.

Since the school doesn't have its own full sized commercial kitchen, teachers were left scrambling to come up with a solution.

NSW Teachers Federation representative and Technology teacher at Maitland Grossmann High School John Grimes said the school needs its own full sized commercial kitchen.

"The school needs a fully functional kitchen on site, what would have been good is if it was done years ago," he said.

Mr Grimes said at first the department was going to build the school a demountable kitchen, but as that would take years there are now plans in place to renovate an existing small kitchen at the back of the school hall.

This kitchen would be ready to use at the beginning of 2025, and Mr Grimes said while it's certainly welcome it's not a perfect solution.

"It's still a little bit up in the air about how it's actually going to work out for the kids," he said.

"The good thing about what the department has decided, to renovate the kitchen, is at least we will have that as a fixed resource into the future.

"They're still going to need to build a full sized kitchen down the track, but at least renovating this existing space we'll be able to keep that."

A NSW Department of Education spokesperson said it is exploring suitable medium and long-term options for the school.

"The school is maintaining continuity in the affected courses, with a focus on senior students, by using the school's kitchen, which meets the standard required to deliver hospitality teaching and assessment," the spokesperson said.

"Its size means only small groups can be taught at any one time, but the school is managing this with additional staffing."

Mr Grimes said due to the size of the existing kitchen teachers are spending extra hours running multiple practicals and assessments.

"At the moment with the space we schedule groups of four to five students on a rotation basis, so every time they have a practical or an assessment task where they're actually cooking, the teachers need to run the practical three or four times to get through the class which is a huge workload," Mr Grimes said.

"And the logistics of what to do with the students that aren't in the class, that aren't cooking, it's a supervision thing and they're managing that around all their other classes as well so it's a busy time."

The school has about 12 Year 12 and 12 Year 11 students currently studying the Hospitality course, which once renovated, the kitchen will be able to accommodate.

But, a full sized class is 22 students and Mr Grimes said the renovated kitchen wouldn't be able to accommodate that many students at once, if a full class size enrolled in the future.

Mr Grimes said it has been known to the department that using an external kitchen wasn't a long term solution.

"We have been aware for at least four years that we have had concerns about Maitland Gaol's long-term facility access, but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears amongst the department up to this point," he said.

The school had been using the gaol site for about 15 years.

Maitland City Council shut down the gaol on March 20 after a safety review of the site, and it is currently closed until further notice while an assessment of required repair work takes place.