We speak to The School of Artisan Food’s Ian Waterland whose amazing life journey includes a career spanning health and social care, and now part-time tutor and managing director at the school
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00:00 Hello Ian, please introduce yourself. My name is Ian Waterland and I'm here at the
00:05 School of Artisan Food. Great, and when did the school start? So the school was
00:10 established in 2009 so we've been here quite a while now. Okay, and what were the
00:16 motivations behind it? So Alison Sponprenti, our founder, actually got
00:22 really interested in real bread and she set up the Real Bread Bakery which is in
00:27 the courtyard and then I think she realised that she needed bakers to work
00:31 in the bakery so the whole idea for the school came from that starting point and
00:36 we live we're in a cold regeneration area so we were well supported with
00:40 grants and funding from that side of things so the whole school developed
00:45 from that one starting point. Great, you have an interesting background as well
00:48 actually don't you? It's quite a variety yes, yes I spent nearly 30 years working
00:55 in mental health, I trained as a psychiatric nurse and I've done all
00:58 sorts of work in that field, health and social care, and then I was getting to
01:03 the point where I needed a change for obvious reasons possibly after 30 years
01:07 in mental health work and I sort of accidentally ended up here as a student
01:12 about 10 years ago. So I arrived as a student not really knowing what it was
01:18 going to lead to, finished the course, set up a micro bakery and I run that for
01:24 eight years in Leicestershire and then gradually started teaching because I was
01:30 interested in sharing real bread and baking skills with people so I've taught
01:35 a whole variety of different people and then I started teaching here and sold
01:40 them a course on how to set up a micro bakery and then I started teaching here
01:44 more and more and now I teach here a lot and then an admin role came up and I
01:50 became the managing director. Oh wow. So from being a student I'm now the
01:54 managing director and a tutor. What a journey. It is quite a journey. May I ask
02:00 what course did you take first when when you first arrived here? So I actually
02:04 took the diploma, the advanced diploma in baking, which at the time was
02:08 three academic terms, it's now shorter, it's now two, and we covered a whole
02:13 variety of the baking education side and a business module. So the business module
02:20 is what led me to develop my business plan here at the school and that is what
02:24 I launched as my micro bakery. I understand you also teach the
02:29 therapeutic baking course, that sounds amazing. Tell us more about that.
02:33 Yeah so this brings together my two sort of lives really so all that theory and
02:39 knowledge and learning about mental health. I did a degree in mental health
02:43 practice, psychosocial interventions and I've combined that into the baking
02:47 process because baking is essentially a very productive and satisfying activity.
02:52 So we make bread slowly in that course and in all the gaps while the bread is
02:58 proving and developing, we do mindfulness, we learn about stress and vulnerability
03:04 so we apply mindfulness and therapeutic to the activity as well as learning
03:09 little bits of theory, bits and pieces I've picked up along the way and bits
03:13 from my training and education. Do you have any eyes on a course that you
03:19 want to take here at all, any more courses you want to add to your arsenal? I will always be adding to the arsenal.
03:24 The new one that's starting this coming academic year is the full BSc in
03:30 artisan food production so it's a full three-year degree and I'm actually going
03:35 to be teaching on that course a business module because having run businesses in
03:43 health and social care and then run my own micro bakery as a sole trader and
03:47 now running the school I've got quite a good overview of businesses and I did a
03:51 business qualification a while ago as well so I'm bringing all that together
03:55 into teaching the business modules on the full degree course. Great, so how can
03:59 people book onto the School of Artisan Food cookery courses? Straight away
04:05 through the website and we do have sort of very popular Instagram streams and
04:10 other social media channels where all the courses are highlighted and you
04:14 can see lots of information about them but the website is the key place
04:18 schoolofartisanfood.org. We've got links on there for the diploma and the
04:24 foundation degree and the full degree all our programme of short courses. Do you
04:29 have any most popular courses? Oh that's a good question I think it changes over
04:37 time the baking the bread sourdough focus courses are always very popular
04:42 and we do do a lot of those courses because I think that's the thing
04:46 particularly during times of Covid and things like that people really got into
04:50 sourdough so we do do a lot of those courses. The outdoor courses the
04:54 barbecuing smoking curing they've become really popular because I think people
04:59 are learning about non-processed food and the provenance of food and that
05:05 lends itself really well to smoking curing and barbecuing. They're all pretty
05:11 popular. You touched earlier on sourdough people going crazy for sourdough a couple
05:16 years ago. Did you go crazy for sourdough? Well I was running a bakery at the
05:21 time so I was happy supplying a couple of villagers with sourdough and then
05:25 lockdown happened and demand went through the roof so I was very supported
05:31 by the flour mill that produces the flour that I used and I managed to keep
05:35 baking through the whole of lockdown but it was very very busy so I was working
05:42 twice as hard as I had before just to keep up with demand and keep people with
05:46 a nice loaf of bread during lockdown which became so important for people.
05:51 Okay amazing that's a wrap from me thank you for your time it's been amazing.