This page lists what we actually have for AQA GCSE Food Preparation and Nutrition 8585. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
Students who can cook and cannot explain
The characteristic problem in this subject is not that students lack experience. It is that the experience is not attached to any vocabulary.
They have creamed butter and sugar without the word aeration. They have seen a sauce thicken without gelatinisation. They have been told to keep raw chicken on the bottom shelf without cross-contamination ever being named as the reason. In the exam, the mark is for the word and the mechanism, and the doing does not earn it.
Six of these fourteen activities are on the science, and they are the ones worth setting first: macronutrients, micronutrients, the functional and chemical properties of ingredients, raising agents, cooking and heat transfer, and microorganisms with spoilage and food-poisoning bacteria.
The microbiology one is the single most useful of them. Food safety is the area with the most named specifics on the specification, the bacteria, the temperatures, the times, and named specifics are where the marks actually sit.
Half the grade happens in your kitchen
AQA assesses this GCSE with one written paper and two non-exam tasks: the food investigation, which is scientific, and the food preparation assessment, which is the three-dish practical and its planning.
Together those are fifty per cent, and nothing on a website can do them. Your students' investigation is theirs, the dishes are chosen for a brief, and the timing plan only exists once.
One activity prepares for that, covering what each task asks for and how they differ, which is the part students most reliably get muddled before they start. It is a briefing rather than a rehearsal, and it is better set in the weeks before the task than during it.
The written tasks are short, and that is a real limit
Each activity ends with a written answer. In this set they ask for thirty to sixty words, averaging about forty.
That is the shortest of any subject on this site, and it is worth naming rather than leaving to be noticed. Forty words is a sentence and a bit. It rehearses having the point and not building an answer, and AQA's longer questions want a developed explanation with more than one reason in it.
Use these to confirm the knowledge is there, and set the extended writing yourself. AQA's own papers in our past paper archive are free and unaltered.
Food choice and provenance
The other half of the set covers the areas students find easier to talk about and harder to be precise in: the factors that influence what people buy and eat, British and international cuisines, sensory evaluation and how it is actually conducted, food sources and environmental impact, and processing and fortification.
Sensory evaluation is the one to look at if your class writes vaguely about taste tests, because it covers the controls that make one valid.
Using them
The three activities embedded further down are playable here without an account.
The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. For how each is meant to be run, see ready-to-run revision activities. To put several in front of one class in order, build a sprint and share one link. Everything else, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.
What this page does not do
Nothing for the two non-exam tasks beyond one briefing activity.
No extended writing at the length the paper asks for.
No practical technique. Knife skills, dough handling and timing plans are learned at a bench.
It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.