Curry Curriculum...?

Birmingham is the first city to attempt to tackle the unemployment crisis with our favourite topic: spicy food. On the surface, this might seem like a slightly strange solution to the credit crunch, however – there is method in the madness!

Birmingham has a wealthy spicy food culture, and is famous for the first British take on the now increasingly popular ‘Balti’ cooking style. This method of fusion cooking was introduced to the UK by a Pakistani restaurateur in Birmingham almost thirty years ago, now the city hosts a ‘Balti Triangle’ – a region within the city which boasts an abundance of spicy food restaurants and takeaways, and consequently, a region which is rife with employment opportunities.

The Birmingham Baccalaureate, a course which runs alongside GCSEs, is designed to bridge the gaps in the employment skills of young people, and spotting an employment opportunity in Asian cooking within Birmingham, it has been implemented into the curriculum. Teenagers taking the Baccalaureate at school will be taught to cook the home-grown Balti dish in an attempt to increase their job opportunities in the city.

With help from the Birmingham Balti Association, from September this year 10 schools will be teaching skills around life sciences, hospitality, engineering, digital data storage and now Balti cooking as part of the Birmingham Baccalaureate, hopefully providing further career opportunities for teenagers in the city.  

This idea is said to have been met with many positive comments, meaning we could see more schools joining the scheme in coming years. Could Birmingham turn out to be the curry capital of the UK? We’ll have to wait and see!

To learn more about the “Curry Curriculum”, see Chaat! issue 11