Hospitality and Culinary Arts

If you run a business within the Culinary and Hospitality sector, we want to work with you!

Our award-winning Hospitality and Culinary Arts department at Westminster Kingsway College (WestKing) is fully fitted with kitchen, restaurant and patisserie facilities along with expert chef lecturers to provide all of the skills students need to work within the Culinary and Hospitality sectors. If you manage a business within the sector, we want to hear from you.

At WestKing, we are the UK’s leading school of hospitality and culinary arts. With a plethora of food-related TV shows and innovative new food products being bought to the table almost daily, there’s never been a better time to train in a forward-thinking world-renowned institute such as the school of hospitality and culinary arts.

With our extensive gastronomic practice and proven excellence, the college is committed to innovation and high performance in hospitality and culinary arts. We have enviable links and collaborations with the international hospitality industry, leading chefs’ associations and principal figures from the world of gastronomy. We are devoted to high-quality training and development.

Our award-winning team will work with you to provide training opportunities for new and existing staff with a wide range of specialist subjects and deliver them to the highest standards. 

Our Facilities

Our WestKing centre has five stunning centres across Camden and Westminster in central London, with state-of-the-art facilities and teaching spaces to enhance your learning. Our award-winning Hospitality and Culinary Arts department is fully fitted with kitchen, restaurant and patisserie facilities.

Take a look at WestKing’s centres and locations here.

Hospitality Hub

Our award-winning Hospitality and Culinary Arts department has supported more than 2,000 students into hospitality careers in the last two years. The Hospitality Academy Hub combines this experience with a range of new initiatives to provide flexible wrap-around training and professional development.

The Mayor’s Academies Programme aims to support Londoners hardest hit by the pandemic into good work in sectors key to London’s recovery and long-term economic growth, as part of the London Recovery Programme. It will do this by providing financial support for the coordination and quality marking of training in London (including adult education) and the provision of bespoke support to help newly skilled people into work in our priority sectors.  

We provide free training opportunities and support packages to help Londoners get a job in the Hospitality and Culinary Arts sectors. We do this by providing bespoke flexible learning programmes to fit individual circumstances and availability. Our aim is to give them the confidence and skills they need to be employable within 3 to 5 weeks, and a guaranteed job interview with an employer who is accredited with the Good Work Standard.

Our Mayors Skills Academies are all credited by The Quality Mark which identifies our academies to be excellent, industry-relevant training in the capital. The Quality Mark Statement also represents our commitment to including a combination of sector-specific questions, and wider cross-cutting issues like diversity and inclusion, sustainability, Good Work and the engagement of under-represented groups.

The Craft Guild of Chefs, Royal Academy of Culinary Arts, The Worshipful Company of Cooks, Institute of Hospitality, UK Hospitality – represent a plethora of employers in the hospitality industry. We work with them to shape the skills and employment provision in line with short, medium, and long-term industry needs to maximise career opportunities and make the hospitality sector more inclusive.  

We, therefore, have designed the following short and sharp courses and have had them endorsed by professional bodies so employers can rest assured that individuals who come through these short courses will have a high-quality entry point qualification to get them started in the workplace.  

Examples of our courses include:

• Introduction to Culinary skills
• Basic knife skills 
• Soups, stocks and sauces 
• Cookery methods  
• Preparation of flat fish & round fish 
• Halal poultry cuts   
• Level 2 Food hygiene (separate certificate) 
• Level 2 HACCP for catering and retail (separate certificate)   
• Introduction to Food and beverage service
• Introduction to bakery and pastry

Mayors Academy of Hospitality (MAH) Certificates are endorsed by Industry partners. Organisations we work with include:

How you can work with us

Our employer partners are committed to improving the lives of Londoners. By working with us, you will be helping people upskill or enter a new profession, and at the same time fill vacancies in key industries. Our partners work with us in the following ways:

• Providing work experience opportunities
• Taking on apprentices
• Identifying skills shortages and working with our colleges on curriculum planning
• Participating at our recruitment events and jobs fairs
• Creating jobs and guaranteeing job interviews
• Provide professional briefs or input into our curriculum design 
• Join our Advisory Board 
• Host visits, industry insight events or share your experience as a speaker 
• Be a mentor or provide mentors to support new entrants 
• Design bespoke courses to train new entrants  
• Select ‘work-ready’ candidates from our talent pool 

We are looking for more employer partners to offer interview/trial days to our graduates of these programmes. If you are interested in taking part or would like to speak to us about a bespoke upskilling short course for your back-of-house or front-of-house team, then please register your details in the form below or email vince.kelly@westking.ac.uk