The strength and buckling problem of a five layer sandwich beam under axial compression or bending is presented. Two faces of the beam are thin aluminium sheets and the core is made of aluminium foam. Between the faces and the core there are two thin binding glue layers. In the paper a mathematical model of the field of displacements, which includes a share effect and a bending moment, is presented. The system of partial differential equations of equilibrium for the five layer sandwich beam is derived on the basis of the principle of stationary total potential energy. The equations are analytically solved and the critical load is obtained. For comparison reasons a finite element model of the beam is formulated. For the case of bended beam the static analysis has been performed to obtain the stress distribution across the height of the beam. For the axially compressed beam the buckling analysis was carried out to determine the buckling load and buckling shape. Moreover, experimental investigations are carried out for two beams. The comparison of the results obtained in the analytical and numerical (FEM) analysis is shown in graphs and figures. The main aim of the paper is to present an analytical model of the five layer beam and to compare the results of the theoretical, numerical and experimental analyses.