He lit up the room when he was 10 and still does that now

SALUTE TO LAYTON - ONE OF TWO GREATER MANCHESTER STARS IN STRICTLY FINAL

- STEPHEN TOPPING

STANDING in the classroom where she taught a Strictly Come Dancing finalist as a year six pupil, Joanne Morris reflects on the enormity of his achievements.

St Paul's CE Primary School stands to the west of the Dickie Bird estate, on the edge of Bury.

Famous for being split in the middle by the M66 motorway, the Dickie Bird is in the top one percent most deprived areas in the country. It's the estate where stage and screen actor Layton Williams grew up as a young boy- and St Paul's is where his talent first shone.

"I think the biggest thing is how proud we are," Joanne, now headteacher at St Paul's, tells the M.E.N. She looks towards the Dickie Bird estate and says: "I'm very emotional, I could cry thinking about how that tiny boy, that lives on a back street up there, from one of the most deprived areas in the country, is now on Strictly Come Dancing"

As a young boy, Layton 'never really had dreams' of the career he would go on to enjoy. It was his performance of Captain Hook, in a school production of Peter Pan, with parts Joanne had re-written for the school's pupils, that set Layton on a path that would ultimately lead to the Strictly final tonight.

"He played Captain Hook and had a standing ovation," Michelle Forshaw, Layton's mum, told the M.E.N.

"People were throwing roses at him.