Each month, staff from the Amelia and the wider council will be sharing an hour of their time with young Home Educators, giving them a hands-on introduction to their role.
Read more to find out how they get on.
Home Educator Careers Taster - Session four
Job of the month: Dan Brooker-Rodriguez, Senior Environmental Health Officer TWBC
This month, our Home Educators took up the chance to find out what an Environmental Health Officer does.
Dan began the session showing the group a short film introducing his team’s work:
Working in Environmental Health - localcounciljobs.gov.uk
“My team’s hygiene inspections are the difference between a nice meal out or food poisoning. Or maybe even worse. So I’d say we make a huge difference to the local community.”
The film was greeted immediately with questions about food hygiene ratings.
“What is a safe number?”
Dan replied it would be a 3+ but surprised the group by informing them that in fact 4s and 5s are the most common score - a reassuring statistic!
When explaining what his job looks like on a daily basis, Dan told the group that food hygiene inspections are the bread and butter of his role. When new restaurants open, they will have an unannounced inspection and, of course, when a site receives a low rating inspections and revisits are made more frequently.
Dan then went on to expand on other areas that fall under his remit, challenging the Home Educators to spot some of the health and safety issues in a series of photos from real life. The shocking pictures caused a stunned silence, for who could fail to see that perching a ladder precariously over a staircase and then proceeding to climb it, or else standing with no protection on a roof and throwing debris and tiles to the ground were anything but health and safety disasters waiting to happen! Despite all this, Dan reassured the group that the UK has one of the best health and safety records in the world.
“What’ the worst thing you’ve ever found in any inspection?”
Dan’s answer to this had everyone cringing… while working in Gibraltar, he had been called to a cockroach infestation. Along with the pest control team, he started spraying the premises and at once the whole place came alive with cockroaches - the floors, the walls – he was even knocking them off his legs! The entire floor had had to be dug up and the site fumigated twice!
Dan now revealed a box he had brought along containing a UV lamp. He asked everyone to wash their hands then place them under the lamp and any residual dirt would glow purple in the light. However, it turned out the group were very diligent about hand washing and there were no shocking results!
“Is it a fun job?”
Despite the worst-case scenarios painting a rather dramatic picture, Dan’s answer was rather reassuring. Going back to food hygiene inspections being at the heart of his role, he said that while things can in fact get be a bit repetitive, if a site scores a 5 and then gets a 5 again that can only be a good thing for everyone!
The Home Educator Careers Taster series continues the second Tuesday of each month 10am-11.30am. To find out more and to book onto a session, click here.