JAMIE OLIVER: AT SCHOOL I FELT WORTHLESS – I DIDN’T READ A BOOK TILL I WAS 35

Jamie Oliver has a new mission: he wants classrooms to be inclusive for every child. The chef, campaigner and author, who just turned 50, has spent two decades fighting to improve food education. Now, he wants to reform the education system itself, so dyslexic students are taught in a way that supports neurodivergent brains.

Oliver, England’s bestselling non-fiction author of all time, was officially diagnosed with dyslexia this year, but says he was “the special needs kid at school” with nothing to offer. In primary school, he struggled to read and absorbed the belief that he was stupid, thick, worthless. By the time he left, he “resented” most elements of school. “That resentment was mainly through fear,” he explains. “My fear was words in black and white and ‘read that book’ and exams. I was so happy to get out.”

If he hadn’t discovered his passion for food – at his parents Sally and Trevor’s pub The Cricketers in Saffron Waldon, Essex, while he was still in primary school – he believes his life would have been very different. “I’m not a victim because I found cooking,” he tells me. “It definitely saved me. Cooking for strangers; cooking for loved ones; the concept of serving people. It’s such a lovely thing to do.”

While he was called a “dunce” at school, he thrived in the kitchen, where he started working on weekends, aged 10. “Way too young, it was probably illegal,” he laughs. “Slave labour – £1.20 an hour. There, I knew I wasn’t thick: I was shown something and I could repeat it. I was called quite a few things [at school], but it didn’t affect me as much. I just wanted to be – and dreamt of being – in the kitchen. I knew at 12 I was going to be alright. I represent the 30 to 40 per cent [of people with dyslexia] who escape. But even if you’ve escaped, you’ve still probably put up with quite a lot. And if you haven’t escaped, which is probably the majority, then you’ve probably been in fight-or-flight mode for some decades.”

While school failed him, pub life saved him and gave him an education. “I had a masterclass in the deeper meaning of community,” he says. “It’s the most inclusive place on Earth. I’d sit for hours with old-age pensioners. My best friends were travellers and Cockneys. In the pub, you feel the joy and the pain of the community.”

We’re sitting in Oliver’s north London office building. He’s wearing jeans and his classic Adidas trainers. There are traces of the cheeky geezer whose cookery programme The Naked Chef catapulted him to fame in 1999, but also of the decades of hard graft in the creases in his face and tired eyes. He’s prolific. He’s written 35 books, using a dictaphone to get his words down; taken part in more than 30 television series; created a cookware range. He also created a chain of 25 restaurants, until they ran into financial troubles in 2019 – a time he’s described as “the hardest of my life”.

“My career is a patchwork quilt of doing things that no one would ever do. Extraordinary successes as well as failures,” he tells me.

Oliver chats rapidly. His thoughts jump around; he’s warm, open and passionate. This could almost be excellent pub chat. Except I sense he’s trying very hard to stay on message.

His crusade, this time, is a shake-up of the education system, so it serves all neurodivergent children, who make up a quarter of students in school. I think he will achieve it. This incredibly effective campaigner banished Turkey Twizzlers from school menus 20 years ago – “I didn’t just talk about it from afar. Seeing is believing. We were in there, getting our hands dirty” – and was instrumental in the implementation of the 2016 sugar tax.

He still believes food education is the foundation of a thriving society. “If I had a magic wand, I’d want every 16-year-old to leave school with 10 recipes to save their life, the basics of nutrition, to know where food comes from, how it affects their bodies, and know how to budget,” he says. “It’s such an easy thing. I’m slightly confused about the purpose of school, because if you look at the two things that are hurting British people, it’s obesity and diet-related disease, and debt.”

His dyslexia campaign came about when his first children’s novel Billy and the Giant Adventure was published in 2023. Oliver appeared on BBC Breakfast and tried explaining how fiction writing felt different from cookery books – and surprised himself by crying on live TV.

“It’s the last chip off my shoulder. I never read a narrative book until I was 35. And as I started saying it, I became seven again. I opened up a box – a deep set of emotions and memories – that I locked many, many years ago,” he explains. His emotion was matched by experiences from dyslexic people countrywide, who shared their own stories of feeling worthless, stupid and misunderstood, from children, parents and dyslexic chief executives of multi-billion pound companies. “I knew that was the beginning of it,” he says.

The campaign so far is documented in Jamie’s Dyslexia Revolution, which will be shown on Channel 4 on Monday. I was in tears watching the experiences of seven and eight-year-olds who believe they’re worth less than their peers. “That’s where the damage is being done,” he tells me.

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In an average class, 10 to 15 per cent of students will be dyslexic, although many aren’t screened. In prison, where inmates are routinely screened, it’s 50 per cent. The cost to the economy is an estimated £1.4bn per year, according to the Pro Bono Economics team. The cost to people’s mental health is immeasurable.

Oliver explains: “There’s entrepreneurs on one side, prison on the other, and then everything in the middle: the real grit and grime. I was walking through a very rough council estate with a specialist, and he said: ‘Those prison percentages will be the same here.’ We get paid less, on average, than most people – because of the trail from school: being over-defensive, getting in trouble, less attainment, less exam results, less well-paid jobs.”

Oliver has asked Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson to reform primary schools so children are screened routinely for processing differences including dyslexia, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He wants the Government to provide more funding and training for teachers to support neurodivergent children from when they start school.

“It’s about education evolving and allowing kids acceptance of themselves,” he explains. “What’s beautiful about studies done in fully inclusive classrooms is that it’s not just neurodivergent kids that thrive, it’s all kids. One in four kids is not ‘special’. It’s not a special education, it’s education.

“Brains have always been like this. Nature’s intention is for diversity, for different thinkers and problem solvers. What isn’t very natural is a system that’s 100 years old, hasn’t changed much, and is quite narrow.”

His own home is full of neurodivergence, with diagnoses of dyslexia, ADHD and autism. “We embrace it,” he says. “Then everybody learns.” Oliver has been married to Jools, also 50, for 25 years next month, and they have five children: Poppy, 23, Daisy, 22, Petal, 16, Buddy, 14 and River, eight. “We have lots of different opinions and thinkers around the table, and we process and see things in quite different ways. It’s exhausting, but generally speaking, it means you’re pretty good at listening or seeing things from other people’s perspective,” he believes.

He’s grateful for his big family and long marriage, so much so that he and Jools have renewed their vows twice over the past two years, first in the Maldives in 2023 with the children – “we’d never had a posh holiday before” – and then on a road trip together last year. “Our first holiday without kids, since we had kids. Sort of a teenagers’ road trip. She has a love relationship with Elvis. Even though he’s dead, he still seems to be everywhere I go. So we went to the same church where he got married,” he laughs.

He says campaigning swallows up a lot of time. “Jools has been so amazing,” he says. “[Campaigning] often causes trouble, and even for the best moments in the world, you get a proper kick up the ass on a regular basis. Jools takes the weight of that, so it’s definitely a team effort.”

That effort pays off, though, and can bring about genuine change. On Thursday night, at a screening of Jamie’s Dyslexia Revolution at the British Library, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson confirmed her support, saying: “I am determined to reform the system for children with SEND so all children can achieve what they’re capable of by making that a really integral part of our school system.”

Reforms will be set out by the Government later this year. Let’s see how those play out. Hopes are high, but resources are scarce and teachers overwhelmed by classroom challenges.

It’s the very start of changes that are long overdue. For all of us in neurodivergent families, I’m glad we’ve got Oliver on our side. When I ask if, for all the complexities that neurodivergence brings, he would choose to be dyslexic, he replies emphatically: “100 per cent.”

Jamie’s Dyslexia Revolution will be shown on Channel 4, Monday 9 June at 9pm

2025-06-09T11:37:10Z