CHILDREN got their first taste of a Bradford school through a summer session including a cookery class run by a former Great British Bake Off contestant.
More than 80 children, aged 11, will attend a two-week Titus Salt School Summer Olympics event at the Baildon school.
The children will each take part in week-long Olympic-themed activities to ease them into life as a student at the school from this September.
Activities the children will be taking part in include designing a mascot for the Tokyo games, a refugee workshop based around learning about the Olympic Refugee team.
The cooking activity was led by Sandy Docherty. She took part in the 2015 series of the Great British Bake and is the child protection and welfare officer at Titus Salt School.
She put the children through their paces, teaching them how to make yoghurt bundt cake and cup cakes from scratch using a recipe card.
The youthful group also used a yoghurt pot to measure out the ingredients they needed for the cakes.
The children got to take their creations home with them, not before they did the washing up.
Ms Docherty says she was impressed by the standard of some of the chefs in the making.
She said: "People at home don't always have the equipment and they think they can't bake or cook.
"We didn't use a mixer for the session.
"I thought they were really good. Some of the kids said it was the best part of the summer school so far.
"The baking session also taught them about being polite and kind, sharing with each other and teamwork.
"They were enthusiastic and doing an activity they were interested in and how the ingredients came together. They were taking it in.
"At the end, some of them were saying 'have I made that?'"
Some of the children who took part in the baking session said they had fun in the kitchen.
Kalem, 11, said: "It was really, really good. It was really good fun.
"It was good doing something like this."
Laurie, also 11, said: "I was fun. I had never heard of the yoghurt cake we made before.
"I'm looking forward to tasting it."
It is being held as part of the Department for Education-funded national Summer Schools programme for secondary schools.
Summer schools which have an academic focus has the potential to support attending pupils to make up for some of their missed education through lockdown. It is also believed to give participating students a boost ahead of the autumn term.
Zainab Asghar, leader of maths transition and key stage 3 co-ordinator in maths at Titus Salt School, said: "It is a group project held over two weeks.
"We will be doing the same series of activities with a different group of kids next week.
"They have been taking part in a lot of different activities and things to keep them engaged and make them aware of what we do at Titus."
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