AI training at Chefs in Schools

Chefs in Schools is a charity that helps schools transform the food and food education they serve, by recruiting and training school chefs and running online and onsite training. It was founded in 2018 by chef Nicole Pisani, former head chef at NOPI, and Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of Leon.

Based in Brixton, London, the charity works across London, the South West and Yorkshire, and had reached 100,000 children by August 2024. It won a BBC Food & Farming Award in 2023.

Chefs in Schools is a lean, mission-driven team. It needed practical AI skills that would save time on research, document work and day-to-day admin, without turning the training into abstract tech theory.

Like many charities, the team had mixed technical confidence across roles, so the training had to be accessible for beginners and immediately useful for everyone.

General Purpose delivered a full-day Mastering ChatGPT workshop for the whole team on 24 September 2025, in person at the charity's office in London. It was built around scenario-led, hands-on exercises from the team's own work.

The workshop covered better prompting, document comparison, deep research, custom GPTs, drafting support, and checking AI answers for bias and hallucinations before using them.

• After the workshop, attendees expect to save an average of 53 minutes each per day using ChatGPT.
• 92% feel more confident spotting AI's limitations, such as bias and hallucinations.
• 92% would recommend the training to a colleague.

• Document comparison: compares documents and answers questions about them
• Meeting preparation: runs deep research before meetings
• Drafting support: drafts and refines emails and written materials
• Custom GPTs: handle repeated tasks the same way every time
• Output checking: checks AI answers for bias and hallucinations before use
• Admin and planning: supports role-specific admin and planning work