Five Star Kitchen: A Free Food Hygiene Game Made for Learners with SEN

Five Star Kitchen is a free practice game for our Level 1 Food Hygiene Awareness course. Instead of pages of reading, each lesson starts with a short audio lesson to listen to, then practice games, then a picture quiz. At the end there’s a practical picture quiz of 20 questions. It was made first for people who learn better in different ways or settings, including people with autism, learning disabilities, ADHD or dyslexia.

October 2026. Play it free on the Five Star Kitchen page.

Where the idea came from

Good Food Hygiene was founded by Gemma Redshaw, who has spent nearly 30 years working in kitchens and bars across Manchester, from washing pots to running kitchens and training the people in them.

Gemma is also a mum of children with autism, and that is what inspired her to build this platform. Being good at a job and being good at reading a screen of text are not the same thing. Plenty of people learn best by seeing and doing, at their own pace, and most training isn’t built for them.

The problem with most food hygiene training

The law says everyone who handles food at work must be supervised and instructed or trained in food hygiene, to suit the job they do. In practice, that training is almost always pages of reading followed by a written test.

That works for many people, but it shuts others out: people with autism or a learning disability, people with ADHD or dyslexia, people who learn better in different ways or settings, and people still learning English. Many of them would be good in a kitchen. The course is what stops them, not the food safety.

It matters because kitchens are where a lot of people find their first job. A food hygiene certificate is often the first thing a kitchen asks for.

What Five Star Kitchen does differently

• You learn by doing. Each rule is practised as a hands-on task, not read as a paragraph.
• Mistakes teach, they don’t punish. When something goes wrong, the game shows what happened and why, then you try again. There’s no “game over”.
• No time pressure. Take as long as you need.
• Everything can be read out loud. There are settings for larger text, less movement, the names of each place in the kitchen, and colour names on chopping boards and knives.
• It works with a mouse, a touchscreen or a keyboard, in a web browser, with nothing to install.

There are six short lessons: why it matters; clean hands, clean you; keep it apart; cold, hot and dates; clean as you go; and the law and the inspector. Each one has an audio lesson to listen to, then practice games, then a picture quiz. After all six there’s a practical picture quiz of 20 questions.

Practice lessons for our courses

For now, Five Star Kitchen is free practice. It covers the same topics as our Level 1 Food Hygiene Awareness course, so it’s a good warm-up before the course and a good way to keep things fresh after it. You need a free Good Food Hygiene account to play, and your progress saves to it as you go. There’s no certificate for the game yet. If you need a certificate for work, take the Level 1 Food Hygiene Awareness course itself.

What comes next

Gemma’s aim is to build our food hygiene courses this way, so that learners with SEN and disabilities can earn their food hygiene certificates in a way that suits their needs. That means:

• a certificate for the game, once it has been reviewed by The CPD Group;
• ways for colleges, special schools, day services and supported employment schemes to set up their learners and follow their progress;
• the game in Welsh, then more of the languages our courses come in;
• more lessons, and more of our courses taught by doing.

Try it, and help us build it

Play Five Star Kitchen free. If you support learners with SEN or disabilities, we’d like to build this with you. Get in touch and tell us what your learners need.