Simon Fanshawe Blog

Claims for the effects of the arts in school have reached dolphin-like proportions in recent years. In the same way that the fashion for swimming with dolphins led to cures for everything from dyslexia to depression, the so-called Mozart effect of the arts - in which children listen to classical music and their reading ability almost instantly improves - has led to an assumption that teaching the arts in schools improves academic results. There is no research to suggest this is the case.

This is not a remarkable story about an extraordinary man. It’s a bog-standard story about a good man. Terry Creissen has three sons, a wife and a mortgage. He also has passion. In the stilted language of an Ofsted compliment, he runs a “very good school with many excellent features”. He’s not a “superhead”, a saviour, a rising star. He’s just a headteacher. And he’s totally in favour of the government’s white paper on education reform.

Luljeta arrived in Britain in 1999. She came via Italy and France, and it cost her and her husband £8,000. But she didn’t fly in first-class. She arrived in Portsmouth in the back of a truck with 50 other people from all over the world. Her home in Albania had been burnt to the ground.

She and her husband paid the money to an “agent” they’d never met before. “You are in their control,” she says. “You are their property”. Five months pregnant, and with a daughter aged two-and-half in tow, she and her husband fled the Serbs. They were aiming for America.