Jamie Oliver urges children to 'celebrate their neurodiversity' at Essex primary school

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Jamie Oliver has opened up about his struggles with dyslexia while speaking to primary school children in Essex.

The chef and author visited Great Bradfords Junior school in Braintree were he told the pupils to "celebrate their neurodiversity".

He was speaking about his new book Billy and the Epic Escape, which he said he wrote using a dictaphone because of his learning difficulty.

"I see a lot of kids that are downtrodden and beaten in their mind about how they’re not the same as everyone else," he said.

"They’re not achieving the same and that makes me very sad. I feel that very closely.

"Getting these kids to celebrate their neurodiversity and the way they see the world, get them to understand they will see things differently and have different solutions to problems, I think that’s what it’s all about for me."

The visit tied in with the opening of the school's new garden, which was paid for by Jamie's publishers.

It is an outside space that the children can now use to both learn and relax.

Beverley Thompson, a teacher at Great Bradfords Junior School, said: "A lot of learning today is desk-based so having that opportunity to come out and enjoy reading in a lovely environment.

"It’s combining those two pleasures in life of being outside but also reading because everyone wants to escape in a book." Jamie's school dinners campaign first hit the headlines 19 years ago - and he says that getting children to understand where their food comes from is just as important today.

He said: "We’ve really distanced our children from food and therefore cooking, growing and the mud, the further away we get our kids from the mud the iller they get.

"This primary school age is the holy grail for making them know there is this connection, a tiny little seed can grow into a fruitful plant and if you do a few things to it, it’s called cooking and if you do it in a nice order with some creativity it’s called a delicious dinner."

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