“It was super illegal,” the 31-year-old British hip-hop musician confirms as he speaks to Big Issue over video call – on a break between cooking sessions with this year’s cohort for his school, Chilli Con Carner, which he is keen to stress is very much legal a decade on.
Loyle Carner, whose real name is Ben Carner-Loyle, started Chilli Con Carner with his friend and creative director Mikey Krzyzanowski. He wanted to teach kids with ADHD how to cook, because cooking had helped him growing up with ADHD.
In a gung-ho fashion, they launched the school and taught the kids to cook themselves. Now it’s more established, Carner-Loyle no longer teaches at the school (they have professionals for that), but he still helps in the classroom as a teaching assistant. The London-based school runs for around a week each summer, when they take on a new group of students aged 14 to 16, all of whom have ADHD or other neurodiversity. On the morning we speak, the kids had been learning to break down a chicken. Earlier in the week, they had had a visit from Jamie Oliver, went to meet Yotam Ottolenghi and learned to make pizzas from Breadstall Pizza bakers.
Sitting beside Carner-Loyle on the video call is 16-year-old Xenia, one of this summer’s participants. “I’m so grateful I was able to come this year. It’s been amazing,” she says. “Everyone is so nice. We’ve been learning incredible things. We’ve got amazing instructors and people coming to teach us about their professions. It’s a lovely space to learn more about cooking and how it affects our ADHD and meet people similar to us.”
Each summer a new group of students joins the Chilli Con Carner cookery school. Image: Supplied
Carner-Loyle was among the first of his peers to be diagnosed. He says he would attribute some of the best parts of his childhood to ADHD but also some of the lowest. “There was an element of feeling very different to a lot of my peers when I was growing up. It was before it was cool to be neurodiverse or there was any education of it in the world, and so no one knew how to talk about it,” he recalls.
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His mother was a special education teacher, and she realised he had ADHD.
“I was lucky to have her as my mum,” he says. “She understood when I was young, before I was diagnosed, that I probably had ADHD. She put big emphasis on anything kinetic in my house and cooking was a big one. It gave me a lot of peace and self-confidence. It gave me something that was mine and helped me go into school and feel like I was actually good at something.”
Children with ADHD have more than 100 times greater risk of being permanently excluded from school than other children, according to the UK ADHD Partnership. Carner-Loyle says, “We’ve had so many kids who don’t go to school, kids that don’t feel like they want to learn, feel like they don’t have an opportunity to get jobs because nobody’s giving them any space where they can be good at something. They’re just basically pointing out what they’re bad at.”
Chilli Con Carner helps these young people thrive.
“We have privilege because we’re not shackled by the curriculum,” Carner-Loyle adds. “It feels like schooling is archaic and tailored for one particular kid. There are loads of children that get a lot out of knuckling into their studies. Nothing against those children, but this model that only fits one type of child is upsetting because there’s so many other types of children that have so much to offer the community, the country, the world. They don’t get unlocked.
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“What’s nice here is it gives the guys a view of an educational environment where they’re learning, picking things up and using those skills. It’s not that they’re not capable of learning. The hope is at some point that can be translated into school.”
Chilli Con Carner students enjoy the fruits of their labour. Image: Supplied
Some participants have been so inspired that they have got jobs in kitchens. Xenia thinks she might like to have a career in food or perhaps work with refugees and asylum seekers and share her love of cooking with them.
“I’ve always struggled in academic environments because there’s a lot of people and the pace can be too fast; too slow. Everyone has different learning methods. Here, there’s so much space to hang out and talk and relax,” she says.
Carner-Loyle tears up when he hears Xenia speak about what Chilli Con Carner has given her. “It makes me want to cry,” he says, pausing to wipe his eyes. “It makes me feel like we’re in the right place doing the right thing. I just wish it could be bigger so we could get in contact with more kids. I fund the school myself. This year, we’ve got some additional funding from Jamie Oliver, which is pretty incredible. You know, it’s hard. It’s a difficult thing to take further. It’s a special thing to know that it works, because when we first started the school, it was like, I’ve got this thing that helps me, will anyone feel the same?”
Now they know its potential, Carner-Loyle is appealing to any “nice billionaires” who might want to support Chilli Con Carner and help it grow further. “Our hope is to find ways to expand,” he adds. “It’s a small group of kids and we’d love to spend more time with them. If you own a couple of buses and you wouldn’t mind giving them to us and we can kick them into portable cooking schools and take them around the UK, that would be dope.”
Carner-Loyle recalls there being difficult times in his life because of his ADHD. He struggled being on medication, for example, which can be life-changing for some people but cause further challenges for others .“It does a good job of taking your ADHD away, but what I’ve realised is that the ADHD is basically all of you. You just become a bit of a zombie. You look at your peers who are neurotypical and you think: ‘Why are they all so good at stopping when they’re told to stop? They can socialise in a normal way and they don’t say weird things.’”
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He is also particularly sensitive to rejection, which can feel like a “physical pain”.
“It makes relationships really hard – friendships, family and romantic relationships. You’re not only battling with the normal ups and downs and lefts and rights of a relationship. It feels disorientating,” Carner-Loyle adds.
For Xenia, ADHD feels like “having a brain like the engine of a Ferrari with the brakes of a bicycle – you can go super fast and do amazing stuff, but you also crash”.
Parents sometimes ask Carner-Loyle what age their children will “grow out of their ADHD”. He tells them: “I think that it’s much more that your children or young people grow into it. It’s like a big coat when you’re young. As you get older, the coat fits.”
And cooking can be a fantastic tool to help them grow into that coat. For Carner-Loyle, it is “just peace – like meditation for a busy mind”. But Chilli Con Carner isn’t just about teaching kids how to cook. It is teaching kids with ADHD that they are not alone. “I’ve been through all the highs and the lows of having ADHD,” Carner-Loyle says. “We’re able to work through our own things too, because it’s changed so much since I was that age and how it’s dealt with. What Xenia and the rest of the guys are doing with it is informing how we live our lives too. It’s amazing.”
