“It’s the icing on the most delicious cake I’ve ever tasted in my entire life,” is how Global Teacher Prize winner Andria Zafirakou described being appointed an MBE in the New Year’s Honours List.

The associate deputy headteacher was honoured for services to education and young people in Brent, where she teaches at Alperton Community School, and where she says the job “is like being mum to 1,400 children”.

Since winning the million-dollar Global Teacher Prize in Dubai in March she has travelled the world from Scandinavia to South America as an ambassador for the teaching profession.

And she will now go to Buckingham Palace in the New Year to receive her latest honour.

“It’s not something I had ever envisaged receiving,” said Ms Zafirakou, an art and textiles teacher.

“It’s going to be such a wonderful opportunity for my family to celebrate and for the school community to celebrate as well. The hardest part was not being able to tell anyone about it!”

Ms Zafirakou, who insists that even the hardest-to-reach pupils can flourish if you go the extra mile for them, says she has noted similar problems for teachers the world over on her travels this year.

That includes low pay and morale and high workload, as well as lack of resources to deal with migrating pupils from other countries and regions.

After beating 30,000 other entries from 173 countries to scoop the Global Teacher Prize, she used her victory speech to call for more importance to be placed on the arts.

And she has since invested her $1 million prize money in a charity called Artists in Residence, which brings artists into schools to raise the profile of the creative arts.

She added: “It’s now being noted across many countries that there’s a need to have a creative curriculum. I’ve met maths and science teachers who came up to me to say how proud they are that I’m advocating science and the arts.”

She hopes her two daughters, aged 8 and 9, and her husband, will be able to go to the palace with her to receive the award.

She teaches in one of the most deprived parts of the UK, where gang violence can be a problem. Research from 2011 found that 149 languages are spoken in Brent, and 85 per cent of students at Alperton do not have English as their first language.

“My calling in life is to make sure that every single child reaches their full potential,” she said earlier in the year.