A taste of reality
Flu and floods have done their best to disrupt the second term of the academic year at Coleg Menai. Illness has been affecting not just the students, but the diners at the restaurant run for outside customers, too. Many large bookings shrunk or were cancelled altogether as a result of the virus.
The floods, which came with exceptionally wet weather in January, put the boiler room under water, causing the boiler itself to fail and leaving students having to heat water on the stoves.
All in all, the new year has been proving something of a wake-up call to the real world for the first-year NVQ students.
If flu and flooding are temporary problems, the skills shortage that has been plaguing the college is a long-term worry. College training courses may be one of the most important ways of easing the shortage for the industry as a whole, but colleges themselves are now feeling the pinch as students are being recruited before their courses are finished by businesses desperate for staff.
This is a type of head-hunting the colleges dislike, but can do little to prevent.
Lecturer Roger Williams has already lost one student to a job in a pub kitchen before his NVQ was completed. The pub is mostly a microwave operation and Williams believes the student's move is unwise.
"It's a difficult issue. Obviously, some students are keen to start earning money, but it's a bit selfish of the industry to recruit them before their training is complete, and it can be short-sighted of the students to take the jobs. It depends what further training they are going to be able to do once they take up their job, but when I have students who want to leave early, I try to give them both sides of the issue. In the end, the decision has to be theirs," he says.
Catering colleges can ill afford to lose students, because their funding is partly related to numbers. Coleg Menai's student numbers are fairly healthy, but many other college catering courses are not so fortunate.
One place where Coleg Menai can be fairly sure its students will not be head-hunted is the neighbouring university catering department, where many of its students go for work experience. The university has about 70 full-time staff and runs seven different catering operations, including Oswalds, a restaurant that often caters for visiting dignitaries; a staff restaurant and bar; the dining rooms for the halls of residence; and outside catering operations.
Catering services manager John Sherlock is very happy with the way the work-experience scheme has developed, partly because it is reaping benefits for the university as well as the college students. University catering staff can get extra training at the college - Sherlock himself is both a tutor and a student at the college, working towards his Certificate of Education.
One example of how the relationship between college and university has developed is the experience of Nia Jones, a chef at the university, who decided that she would like to try front of house work. She went to the college to do some training in the area so she could make the switch.
For the supervisors at the university, having the work-experience students has had the benefit of helping to develop their management skills. "It has made our supervisors look closely at the way they instruct people. They have had to focus on basic principles," says Sue Jones, hospitality services co-ordinator at the university.
The benefits for the work-experience students themselves include the more obvious advantage of taking the first step from learning to the workplace, although when the scheme first started a couple of years ago, getting them to turn up for work proved a bit of a problem.
"Rather a lot of them seemed to think that they didn't really have to turn up," admits Sherlock, "but we seem to have solved that by asking them to sign contracts to make them take the exercise seriously. If they have to sign something, it focuses their minds. It's just like a work contract, except that we don't pay them."
Instilling discipline in the students is one of the important jobs for staff at Coleg Menai, although this is sometimes easier said than done. Discipline is something the staff will be particularly keen to enforce when a group of about 20 students take the trip from Bangor to London for the Hotelympia exhibition next week.
A few years ago on this trip, two students went missing almost as soon as the group arrived in London. They turned up later that day in Soho.
Of course, this is an exception, but it's easy to see why Williams, one of the tutors on the trip, likes to keep a close eye on the teenagers under his charge.
The trips have, on the whole, been very successful. This year the London visit will include not just Hotelympia itself, but visits to the Dome, Michel Roux at Le Gavroche and the kitchens at the Lanesborough hotel, where staff include three former Coleg Menai students.
The trips, like the work experience, help to give the students an idea of the catering world outside the college, and no doubt fuel a few dreams as well.
Later in the year Williams is hoping to organise a European trip, which may be able to attract some European funding. On the last Continental tour, the students visited Brussels, the Rhine, Paris and EuroDisney.
In the meantime, the everyday student life is more about graft than swanning about. Lecturer Martin Jardine's restaurant continues to prosper - flu-hit guests notwithstanding - and the students working there are visibly more confident as the weeks pass.
This is just as well, because many of the diners are not willing to accept anything they think isn't satisfactory. Some don't hesitate to send food back, they complain if service is not up to scratch, and one regular even took it upon himself to test the acumen of the waiting staff by offering cheques without cheque cards to see what happened. All in all, not a bad trial run for the real world.
Next visit: 9 March
