How Alvin Stardust’s son Shaun Fenton became headmaster of Reigate Grammar School

Shaun Fenton is the headteacher of Reigate Grammar School in Surrey and the son of the late glam rocker Alvin Stardust 

Last week, Shaun Fenton, the headmaster of Reigate Grammar School, chairman-elect of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference — and the son of Seventies glam rocker Alvin Stardust — shared his top tips to help Britain’s 11 million children make it through the long summer holidays without being glued to electronic gadgets.

‘The screens can act like the dementors in Harry Potter, sucking out children’s minds and souls!’ he said. So he came up with a solution.

Shaun’s ‘Super Seven Summer’ is a list of activities which, the 48-year-old says, children should complete before picking up their smartphone, games console or disappearing off back to their bedrooms to ‘resume their social media love-in’. 

His holiday commandments are: Get up, washed and dressed without being reminded; make, eat and clear away breakfast; take the dog for a walk (your own or a neighbour’s); get some exercise — a swim, bike ride or jog; play a board game; do a household chore such as stacking the dishwasher; read a book.

In an ideal world, every child would do everything on the list before venturing anywhere near a screen.

Which sounds completely sensible, straightforward and reasonable. 

After all, research shows the average teenager will spend at least seven hours a day on screens if allowed and will be distinctly less happy than others who mostly engage in face-to-face social interactions. 

Nonetheless, Shaun’s list has caused rather a stir — not least among outraged teenagers appalled that ‘get up, washed and fully dressed without being reminded’ counted as one item, as did ‘make, eat and clear away breakfast’.

Shaun's father Alvin Stardust is pictured in his leather finery during his hey-day in the 70s

Shaun’s father Alvin Stardust is pictured in his leather finery during his hey-day in the 70s

Many parents have become animated, too. Some shared cross comments online such as ‘Doesn’t he know it would never work?’ and ‘What planet does he live on? I’d like to see him get my kids to load the dishwasher!’

Others speculated if Shaun would look as good as his late rocker father in skin-tight leathers. (He probably wouldn’t, but he has many other qualities.)

‘I didn’t want to start a debate, it was just a suggestion,’ he says. ‘My two sons have been doing it for years and, yes, they stick to it — they helped design it! It’s important.

‘Yesterday, one of them made his first fried egg for breakfast. Was it a chore? Not really. Was it a sense of achievement? I think it was.’

Shaun is passionate about children. He loves them, respects them, nurtures them and does everything he can to make their lives as stress-free and happy as possible.

He urges them to spend their holidays building camps, climbing trees, getting muddy, scraped and bruised, taking risks, earning money, letting off steam and, well, being children.

‘It’s all a balance — between recharging your battery under a blanket on the sofa watching back-to-back films when term ends and staying up late, but also trying new things and learning new skills,’ he says.

Singer Alvin Stardust is pictured at home in north London with his wife Iris, son Shaun, 4 (centre right) and Adam 2 (centre left) in 1974 

Singer Alvin Stardust is pictured at home in north London with his wife Iris, son Shaun, 4 (centre right) and Adam 2 (centre left) in 1974 

But if he had anything to do with it, there would be no long summer holiday at all. ‘If you were starting from scratch, you’d never, ever, design a school year like this,’ he says.

Partly, he says, because the long winter is such a slog, but more because the summer holiday is just too long.

‘It’s too long a gap to be off the leash,’ he says.

‘Children go from the bells and whistles of a school routine where they’ve got activities and friends and fun all planned around them — then the last bell goes and it’s all, have a great summer, and potentially there’s nothing, just a big unsupervised gap.’

Shaun’s own childhood summers in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire, sound wonderfully unsupervised.

His mother is Iris Caldwell, a dancer and performer who went out with both Paul McCartney and George Harrison at school in Liverpool and still performs in Murder Mystery shows now she’s in her 70s.

She is the ‘funniest, brightest’ person he’s ever met, says her son — but she didn’t believe in homework, particularly in the holidays.

‘She couldn’t understand why teachers couldn’t get it all done during the school day. She thought if they were better at their jobs they wouldn’t have to set any.’

So instead of working through his own list of ‘Summer Seven’, frying eggs, poring over German vocab then settling down with a games console, as his sons do, he spent all day every day playing football and pretending to be his soccer hero, Kenny Dalglish, with his mates, until his mum called him in for tea.

While he took his dad’s fame and the endless stream of famous mates (Sir Cliff Richard is godfather to one of his half-sisters) for granted, life was unusual in the Stardust home. 

(Alvin’s real name was Bernard William Jewry, but he sang under the stage name Shane Fenton in the Sixties, then Alvin Stardust from the Seventies.)

Games in the garden were usually negotiated around a washing line drying his dad’s leather outfits (‘they needed a lot of defumigating’), cases of champagne cluttered the hallway and, as he puts it, he ‘helped open more fetes than most kids did’ with his famous father.

When, in 1985, Alvin was featured on ITV’s This Is Your Life, Shaun, brother Adam and their two half-siblings appeared, too. 

‘We all did a skit of I Feel Like Buddy Holly — Dad’s hit at the time — though of course at home we used to sing, ‘I Feel Like Such A Wally!’

Music and performing permeated everything and no one in his family had ever been to university.

His mum had been super bright, but she turned down a grammar school place because the longer hours got in the way of her dancing. She left school at 15 to work first in a circus, then at Butlin’s.

Alvin, meanwhile, started life as a chorister and boarder at Southwell Minster Collegiate Grammar School but threw it in to follow his love of music.

‘Education wasn’t a pathway that was understood in my family,’ says his son.

So his parents were both quite shocked when Shaun won a full scholarship to Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School — a highly regarded independent School in Elstree, Hertfordshire.

However, he never quite blended in. On their first visit to the school up the long gravel drive, his mum drove an old Honda Accord with a piece of soggy cardboard lodged where the sunroof had popped out and smashed years before.

‘No one else had a cardboard sunroof — the cars were much too smart!’

And when, at the admissions interview, his mother asked if there was anything she could do to support her son, she was told to consider buying him a thesaurus. She replied: ‘Yeah, he’s always been into dinosaurs.’

Alvin made an impact, too. ‘I remember him shouting embarrassingly loudly on the touchline at rugby matches,’ says Shaun. ‘He was very recognisable.’

By then, sadly, his parents — who in their early days worked the nightclub scene as the double act of ‘Shane Fenton and Iris, the personality pair’ — had split.

The break-up sounded harder for Iris than Alvin, who remarried twice, first to actress Liza Goddard and later to actress and choreographer Julie Paton.

Reading between the lines, it sounds as if money was a constant source of friction.

At the height of his fame, Alvin appeared on TV a lot (where Shaun says he saw him most), but forever blamed the onerous Seventies tax regime for cashflow problems, so Iris ended up juggling jobs in shops and sales to pay the bills.

Shaun, meanwhile, threw himself into schoolwork. He thrived and bloomed, played loads of rugby — ‘dad spent hours teaching me how to do a spin pass in the summer holidays’ — and won a place to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford.

There was a brief foray into accounting in the City before he followed his heart into teaching, which he clearly adores.

‘It’s a privilege to be entrusted to help children enjoy the talents they don’t know they’ve got,’ he says. ‘It’s a way of investing in children as a way to help the world become a better, fairer, more environmentally sustainable place.’ 

He did it the hard way — two and a half years as head of humanities at the notoriously rough Ridings comprehensive in Halifax, once known as Britain’s worst school and now closed.

Then came five years as headteacher at a Hertfordshire comprehensive and six years as head at a state grammar in Gloucestershire.

While he and dad Alvin chose very different paths, and didn’t see each other as much as Shaun would have liked when he was young, they were clearly close in later life and his father visited him at all his schools.

Reigate Grammar, where Shaun has been a successful and very popular head since 2012, is his first job in the private sector.

Here, fees tip £6,000 a term and more than 10 per cent of the upper sixth will go to Oxford or Cambridge university.

Considering that he ‘feels sorry’ for today’s generation because the educational stakes they face are so high, he does everything he can to lighten the load.

Two days before his pupils sat their GCSEs and A-levels, he set up a funfair in the playground, with a helter skelter, dodgems and candy floss stall — encouraging them to put down their books, ‘climb to the top of the helter skelter and look at the horizon’.

As he puts it: ‘The value of exam results will fade quite quickly. More important than any fistful of certificates will be the personal qualities you take into life.’

He stresses the importance of mindfulness, mental well-being and allowing sufficient space for ‘creative boredom’ — allowing children to be so bored that they reach for an old board game, a pen and paper, or a discarded toy and start improvising.

‘Children need challenges, but not stress and pressure, and to have frivolous fun.’

During the heavy snowfalls earlier this year, he encouraged parents to keep their children at home, take them sledging and make some memories that they would all benefit from.

Memories have become increasingly precious to Shaun since his father died in 2014, aged 72, having suffered prostate cancer.

‘He did his last gig on a Saturday and died the next Wednesday. Looking back, I would have killed to have been there, but no one knew it was going to be his last,’ he says.

‘He was ill for a couple of years, but he was very private and only told us months before he died.’

Shaun misses him as much as ever. ‘He was a great dad and a great role model and the pain doesn’t go away, it comes in waves,’ he says.

So his message is clear.

‘Celebrate your children,’ he says. ‘Make memories. Don’t let them grow up too soon. Take time off work and spend as much time as you can with them.’

And please, please, please — don’t let them spend the entire summer glued to a screen.



Read more at DailyMail.co.uk