School kitchen staff in Manchester

Yes. Every chef and catering assistant on our Manchester education bench holds a current Enhanced DBS certificate with the Child Barred List check. The certificate is verified before placement, not after, and a copy is provided to the business manager, catering manager, or MAT operations lead before the first shift. We do not place a chef in a school without this check; it is the baseline of the role, not an optional add-on.

Yes. The Manchester education bench covers primaries, secondaries, and MAT kitchens across the full 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester, including the large Trafford and Stockport catchments, the Salford primary estate, and the secondary academies across Bolton, Tameside and Oldham. We place regularly into single-school kitchens producing 150 lunch covers and into MAT central-production kitchens producing 2,000-plus covers across multiple sites. The brief we need tells us which.

Yes. The School Food Standards (England) 2015 regulations set mandatory requirements across fruit and vegetables, starchy foods, protein foods, dairy, and banned items (restriction on fried foods, added salt at the table, confectionery and so on). Our education bench is briefed on these standards as part of onboarding and we cross-check the menu spec with the chef before the first shift. If your academy or MAT has tightened the baseline further (for example, cutting red processed meat or adding a meat-free day), we match the chef to that brief.

Yes. Term-time sickness cover is one of the core reasons Manchester MATs book us. The request is usually at 06:30 on a weekday morning and the named chef needs to be on-site by 08:30 for the 11:30 or 12:00 lunch window. For schools inside M1-M4 we commit a named chef within two hours of the call. For the rest of Greater Manchester (Trafford, Stockport, Bolton, Oldham, Tameside, Salford) the realistic response on a 06:30 call is four to six hours, which in most cases still delivers the chef in time for lunch prep. We will tell you the window at the point of call.

Yes. We hold framework booking agreements with several Greater Manchester multi-academy trusts covering anything from 3 to 25 schools. The framework gives the MAT a single point of contact, fixed rate card across roles and tiers, a single compliance pack (insurance, modern slavery, safeguarding, right-to-work process), and monthly consolidated billing rather than per-school invoicing. Single-school state and independent schools can book on the standard rate card; the framework rate applies once booking volume justifies it.