After winning the Global Teacher award in 2018, Andria Zafirakou used her $1m prize to establish a charity to improve arts education. She talks about life in the classroom, and her new memoir
Three years ago, a miraculous thing happened to Andria Zafirakou, a 42-year-old art teacher at the Alperton community school in the north London borough of Brent. Out of all the 100,000,000 teachers in the world, she was named No 1, Global Teacher of the Year. Zafirakou, who had been nominated by students and colleagues, was awarded that honour at a ceremony in Dubai, along with a cheque for $1m, hers to do with as she pleased. She was so gobsmacked to have won the award, to be up there on the stage clutching the trophy and the cheque, that she had not the first clue what to do with the money.
She still felt that way the following day when she was driven by limousine straight from the airport to Downing Street, where she had been invited for tea with Theresa May, the prime minister, and afterwards when she met with the schools minister, Nick Gibb, and a roomful of education grandees, and representatives of the Varkey Foundation, which made the award. Gibb, it turned out, was there to offer Zafirakou another “prize”, this one a job: he was delighted to announce that the government wanted her to become the new face of a recruitment drive to bring more people into teaching.
