Cut out teachers! No – not cut them out but paper cut-outs! I go to Bounds Green School to receive the cut-outs that the children have done so that I can give them to Tony Blair and remind him of his promise to ensure that every child in the world has the opportunity of going to school by the year 2015. It is a mammoth challenge. For example – Bangladesh alone needs 167,000 teachers and Africa three million.

The children come into assembly in the hall and I talk to them for a bit about the challenge and about the poverty around the world that means that what our kids take for granted, many millions of children around the world don’t even have a chance of – especially girls. One girl asks a really good question at the end. She asked how we would make sure that the money was used properly. That’s something we all want to know and I will put the question to T Blair!

Straight on to North London Schools Exhibition on their work on International Networking. This is a project in Haringey which links schools with those in other countries through their teachers, teaching and pupil contact – and there were some fantastic projects on display. I was really thrilled by the kids there whose horizons will have been forever widened by the experiences of this project. I believe it is really important to give children a vision of a much wider world than their own daily lives. If I think back to my school days, I don’t particularly remember my lessons – but what I do remember is the trips we took, my foreign pen pals, the direct contact with others from other countries. Those memories and experiences shape your thinking.