PUTTING your children on the stage can be difficult, as Margaret Watkins will testify.

But helping other people's children into the world of drama, music and dance makes a fulfiling career.

Margaret, of Kidderminster College, has a library in her rural Neen Sollars home heavily stocked with books on the subject.

But none of her five, now grown up children and stepchildren have been attracted to the profession.

However, there is much to be proud of in the number of students she and her college team have launched into careers in the performing arts over the past 20 years.

Her interest started when she was a schoolgirl in Falmouth, Cornwall. Her mother was a keen director of amateur dramatics in the WI.

Margaret became interested when she helped to sell programmes.

Her talents blossomed leading her to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

At quite a young age her sights veered towards teaching rather than going on stage for which she has no regrets.

''I find working with the young, helping them to express themselves and develop their skills enormously rewarding,'' she said.

Her students are at her favourite ages of 16-19, a time when they are like ''birds learning to fly''.

''The performing arts is not all glamour, it is one of the most highly disciplined professions there is,'' she tells them.

But to the performing arts team at the college all the world's a stage for those who are prepared for hard work and choose wisely from the many parts there are to play. The range is wide from straight acting to the technical side of television production.

Margaret remembers with enormous pride not just the students whose names are now up in lights, but, for instance, a particularly talented student who won a top BTEC award and chose a career using her skills in learning schemes for the disabled.

One of Margaret's special interests is also the use of performing arts as a teaching tool in schools, an area which fits in particularly well with her marriage to creative writing expert Dr Brian Watkins of the University of Central England.

They met when he was an adjudicator and she was an administrator at a drama festival.

In what little spare time they have away from college they run drama courses together for various British education authorities as well as in Canada and Europe.

Together with dance teacher Alison Jones, the couple have become so widely recognised their skills are to be slotted into a European internet education manual.