Every Wednesday the students and teachers of Halinda School in western Sydney are faced with a real challenge: how to concentrate in class with the enticing smells of homemade quiche, lasagne or pizza wafting through the corridors.

Each week it only gets more difficult as the Enterprising Edibles team further develops its cooking and marketing skills, offering evermore enticing options for Wednesday’s lunch menu.

As a school for specific purposes, Halinda caters to students who have intellectual disabilities frequently accompanied by secondary disabilities such as hearing or visual impairment.

However, through creativity and teamwork, the students are able to cook up a delicious and healthy lunch each Wednesday for between 50 and 60 people.

The Enterprising Edibles program, coordinated by teachers Rebekah Ravesi and Sue Griffin, is a cross-curriculum project that employs a wide range of the students’ skills as they prepare and deliver the lunch orders.

Principal Jan Eccleston said the program helped develop skills in functional literacy, numeracy and PDHPE outcomes such as good interpersonal skills and values education.

“The students love it, they really enjoy doing it. Some students working on the program are nonverbal and we’ve designed it to be layered so everyone can participate at their level,” Mrs Eccleston said.

The participants are involved in aspects of the project all week, from creating and distributing the menus and collecting the orders, through to planning, purchasing, preparing and delivering the meals and finally even laundering their cooking uniforms.

Mrs Eccleston said students enjoyed the increased self-esteem and sense of accomplishment that came with accepting responsibility for their tasks.

The team also had a recycling project going with their plastic lunch containers and might soon be growing some of the produce they needed through a planned, self-sustaining “bush tucker garden”.