If that doesn’t work I’ll go to college and study photography

If that doesn’t work, I’ll go to college and study photography. But now I’m just happy that I’ve been in The Bill and The Bizz – and the C&A Ski show catalogue. That was great.”I know that being black is a problem, if I want to carry on modelling or acting. Even Naomi Campell suffers They often want some blue-eyed blonde. But so what? Now it’s all opening up, and you can’t just sit there and not try I know there’ll be failures But I won’t break like kids who can’t deal with rejection. But they had a smile and a wave for Leon.”They’re my friends,” he says.

“They never tease me about my ballet and tap dancing and that I think they know I’m serious But I don’t want to be hanging around like them My mum and dad have worked hard to get somewhere I’d love to be a professional dancer. On the sunny evening I was there, tough boys, black and white, were dribbling a football and killing time They seemed dangerously torpid. A thousand children a week attend her classes, and there is a waiting list of 2,000. Many are from homes where money is short.The focus is not just on acting but justice, morality, equality and the responsibility that children have to make their lives and the world better. My son, now 19, went there and acquired extraordinary confidence, which helped him through the pain and confusion of his father and I divorcing.In some ways, these schools are endearingly old-fashioned. Miss Speake claims that there has never been a single pregnancy or sex scandal in her school in 52 years – and “none of that flower power nonsense”. At Anna Scher’s, cool dudes sing “Catch a Falling Star” without blushing.We may still grieve for a lost world of childhood, but it is remarkable that these children and their parents – even Mandi and Penny – have found a way of keeping aspirations alive, of continuing to fulfil life’s longing for itself.Rosemary’s babyHolly Royal, 12, Elizabeth Smith Model Agency in HarrowHer mum, Rosemary, likes to say that Holly is 13 or even 14 Age is all about how you look, she says.

She’s impatient because she wants her daughter to make it as a model and dancer, and the sooner she gets into the big world the better. She is just as ambitious for her younger one, Tiffany, who’s nine. Rosemary passionately loves her blonde daughters.Holly is tall for her age, and Rosemary is delighted that nature is helping move things along, but she is also awkward, shy and vulnerable. Through the thicket of enthusiasm that pours out of Rosemary, she assures me, in a tiny voice, that she enjoys the buzz of performance. She is sitting tight, with her arms firmly around her lacy blouse. She seems a very retiring sort of young lady to me, who would be happiest eating an apple and reading Little Women on a window sill.”I’m not,” she retorts “I change completely when I’m working or dancing I like people watching me and clapping.