2024 The One Show's Rising Star Chef Russ and team, Pokesdown Community Primary School, Bournemouth

Chef Russ is the head chef at Pokesdown Community Primary School in Bournemouth, where he cooks school lunches for 320-360 kids using just one oven in a tiny kitchen nicknamed Pokey Kitchen!

“Getting the kids to sit down for lunch together is a beautiful thing to do – it’s such an important part of the day.”

Congratulations! How does it feel to win?

It’s so lovely for the team to be recognised. It’s vindication that what we do works. Jermaine Jenas handed over the award on behalf of The One Show – I’m a Liverpool fan, but I’ve always liked Jermaine!

Tell us a bit about your story at Pokesdown…

Before I arrived, all of the school’s food was cooked off site, then brought in and heated up for the children. Now I cook everything in the Pokey Kitchen [previously the school’s broom cupboard] with my sous chef Matt, kitchen porter Tanika and Kelly, my kitchen assistant. We only have one oven with six racks and no walk-in fridge or freezer, so it takes a lot of juggling, time management and prep to make the 320-360 meals a day. 

Matt and I have both worked in hospitality – me for 20 years – and that experience is invaluable. We have to do a little dance around each other every day, juggling things in and out of the oven, but we make it work.  

There must be transferable skills from the restaurant kitchen to the school…

Yes, of course: organisation and pre-planning. You’re still feeding people, they just happen to be young, and it means as much to feed kids as paying guests. Almost more! My previous job saw me working in Cape Town at a 5-star restaurant. But I found myself getting lost in the fine dining, so I did some volunteering to feed homeless children. Soon I found I was enjoying that more, getting more out of it than cooking in the restaurant, so I started looking for a change and found this job. Now I love it!

And you don’t just stay in the kitchen, do you?

Half of my job is also going into the classrooms and teaching the children about food, as well as doing after-school clubs and having educational chats with the kids. We talk about whole foods vs ultra processed foods; healthy eating; and preserving in different ways. It makes my job really interesting. 

You have a daughter in the school – does that mean you hear the kids talking about your food?

Yes, I often hear the kids talking about their school lunches with their parents, but it’s great that they’re chatting about it – they wouldn’t do it if they just had a boring lunchbox or meal. The kids give you HONEST feedback. If they don’t like it, you’ll hear it. 

You don’t have a canteen for the kids to eat their lunch in, so how does it work?

The kids all turn their classrooms into little restaurants at lunchtime, laying the tables with cutlery and putting out cups. Then we wheel the food down on trollies. They get to sit down with their friends and eat together without any distractions – I think that’s a beautiful thing. It’s a really important part of the day and it’s a really nice thing to do. The teaching assistants sit down too and eat with the kids, so they’re learning table manners, socialising skills, how to use cutlery – lots of them don’t get it at home, so at least they can have it at school. 

What are their favourite dishes of yours?

The usual – fish and chips, burgers, chicken nuggets – but we make them all from scratch. We make our own bread every day, pizza is made from dough proved for 24 hours, and chicken nuggets are freshly made with real meat. There are no deep-fat fryers, everything goes through the oven. I’ll often be asked by parents, how come my child will eat your curry but not mine? And my advice is to just keep trying. Sit down with them, eat with them and just keep trying. Kids have a lot more patience than us, so you’ve just got to keep going. 

How do you save money in the kitchen?

Buying seasonal, whole ingredients. By making our own bread every day, it’s a third of the price of buying it. And the money we save means we can buy proper chicken and panne it for chicken nuggets. One day, I heard a kid say to their parent, ‘Ugh, the chicken nuggets aren’t real chicken nuggets!’ – but they are! We’re so used to eating the reconstituted, ultra-processed chicken nuggets that whole chicken nuggets taste strange. It’s really difficult, because brands spend millions to make their fast-food particularly delicious and particularly [attractive] for children, so it’s tricky to get them on board. But after three years I think I’m getting somewhere. Plant-based Thursdays are also a time when I can save money. 

What is your secret to success?

Planning. Working out the menu and what you can cook before you get started is key. Then organising your time. When you see the happy children eating, it’s really rewarding. Matt and I have a motto: it’s never too early and never too much! Never too early to get it in the oven, and there’s never too much food.

What drives you?

Food is such a big thing in all of our lives, and it can make all the difference to our wellbeing. It’s so much more than the sum of its parts. We forget to eat seasonal whole foods. I know it’s hard to pick your way through what’s in the supermarket and work out what’s good and what isn’t. Making good food feels good.

Five years ago I lost my dad to complications from Type-2 diabetes, caused by him not looking after himself. He could hardly walk and lost his sight by the end. It made me sit back and think, ‘I need to clean up the way I eat’ and I looked into nutrition. That’s why I’m so passionate about healthy school food. 

Celebrity judge Mary Berry says: “The dedication and creativity shown by Chef Russ and his team at Pokesdown Primary School are truly remarkable. Their commitment to delivering nutritious, homemade meals and educating students about healthy eating sets a fantastic example for schools everywhere. Many schools would have given up without a dining area but they still found innovative ways of keeping the lunch system going – delivering meals to the classroom on trays with crockery and teaching the importance of eating at a table. Congratulations to the entire team for this well-deserved award!”