Our Chef - Alex Moody

Cooking has always been our Head Chef's passion and from a very young age Alex Moody cooked at home with his parents. After leaving school he studied catering at South Downs College for two years and went on to an apprenticeship at a local hotel. Alex has spent the last seven years at Park working with Steve Cross, LACA School Chef of the Year. Alex won the South East LACA competition in 2021.

At Park Community School, Alex and the school's multi-award winning catering team, continue to redefine school food to ensure all our students receive a healthy well-balanced meal during the school day. Alex is developing and nurturing the talents within the catering team, whose members are rightly proud of the good food that has successfully been embedded into the life of the school and its community.

Alex and the team introduce the students to cuisines from around the world by, for instance, encouraging them to taste Korean kimchi, Middle Eastern tagines, and Japanese inspired sushi. Three days a week students work in the kitchen alongside our chefs and catering team as part of our Much More Than Just A School curriculum.

The catering team work closely with the market garden team helping them to grow our own fruit and vegetables which are used within the school kitchens. We have reared over 200 pigs on our small holding; the meat is used in school lunches, meals within the community and at external events. Through the Market Garden they learn about Farm to Fork ethos and all that it entails.

The catering team played an important role in establishing the Munch Food programme in 2017. Munch provides everyone who comes with a hot two course meal every school holiday and on Thursday evenings. The school also opens on Christmas Day and, in 2021, 140 people across the age-range enjoyed a three course Christmas Lunch, with entertainment and a splendid visit by Father Christmas despite the challenges of Covid.

To further meet the needs of our community the catering team produce nutritious ready meals which are available for collection seven days a week from the Munch emergency freezer in our Dickinson Centre.

To encourage healthy eating beyond school, the team provides cookery lessons for families, where family members come together, cook a meal, eat some of it with us and have plenty remaining to take home.

In 2019, Park Community School was one of nine successful organisations selected by the Department for Education (DfE) to run holiday activities. As part of this, we produced a range of menus for daily meals; this was subsequently used by the DfE as good practice and formed the basis of the recently announced Holiday Activity Programme (HAF) which now runs across every local authority in England.

Park Catering Service