The Images of Delight selling exhibition opening in Oxford this week includes 350 artworks by 25 contemporary children’s book illustrators, including pieces by Anita Jeram, Cathie Felstead, Jill Murphy, Penny Dann and Charlotte Voake for pound;75-pound;100 (the top price is pound;1,500). June 10-17 at the Sarah Wiseman Gallery, Summertown, Oxford (tel: 01865 515123). More details and a preview at www.imagesofdelight.com, which provides all the artists’ biographies and will talk you through starting your collection if you can’t get along to the show.

During the build-up to Refugee Week, (starts June 14, see www.refugeeweek.

org.uk or tel: 020 7820 3055), five secondary schools in the London borough of Tower Hamlets are preparing to showcase creative writing and performance poetry work exploring attitudes to asylum seekers. Eastside Arts in Whitechapel organised work over two years with performance poet Crisis. The project, called In Our Shoes: writing the refugee experience, has led to pupils appearing at London-wide poetry slam events and beyond. Eastside Arts is looking for funding to develop the work further; in the meantime, there are some spare seats at the performance on June 8 at Tower Hamlets professional development centre, English Street, London E3. Young poets from Bethnal Green technology college, Langdon Park, Morpeth, Oaklands and Sir John Cass schools will be appearing. Tel: 020 7247 0216 for more details.

Jonny Zucker was once a stand-up comic with a day job at West Acton primary school. A Class Act, a laugh-a-line teachers’ survival guide written and self-published with former teaching colleague David Parker, appeared in 1996. It included sparky interviews with Chris Woodhead and union leaders, and was remarkable both for the revelation in the accompanying TES interview that Woodhead’s sofa was extremely soft and for its staggeringly high number of typographical errors per page. Now Zucker is a full-time writer and is about to publish his first teenage novel with Piccadilly Press. One Girl, Two Decks and Three Degrees of Love is about the struggles of an aspiring DJ called Zoe to make it in a male-dominated music scene. A quick glance at a sample chapter reveals that there’s still room for a few one-liners, but it’s blissfully free of cameo portraits of education figures.