The benefits of a classical education at Highbury Grove In the 1990s standards fell, and by the turn-of-the-century, thanks to an undercover TV reporter posing as a supply teacher, the school, by now mixed, became a byword for failure. "Ten years ago, it was appalling," says Brown candidly. And that wasn't just what Ofsted said, it was what the local community felt. Parents would do anything rather than allow their children to come here. That was when the fightback began. As part of her widely acclaimed efforts to turn this failing school around - which included rehousing it in new premises - the head teacher, Truda White, had an idea. The 1,300 pupils at the school speak 50 different languages as their mother tongue. Music, she felt, could act as a common language to unite them and mould them into one community. And she took that one stage further. Rather than embracing the musical enthusiasms of the children, she decided upon something more timeless - the classical canon. One inspiration was the Simón Bolívar Orchestra from Venezuela, the internationally renowned face and sound of a nationwide social programme ("El Sistema") that has run since 1975 in the Latin American country, which recruits, trains and equips classical musicians from among the poorest youngsters. With the ongoing support of the Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust, which provides the instruments and covers the extra costs that otherwise would be beyond the standard state school educational budget, Highbury Grove has been working away to build up this radical programme for six years. "At first, our performances could be a bit hit or miss, and it still isn't perfect," says Brown, an Australian who joined four years ago. But we now feel confident enough to start talking about it publicly. Music is at the heart of the curriculum. Every child in their first three years is given the chance to learn a stringed instrument. And, so that they don't come to it blind, Highbury Grove now sends its music teachers out into six feeder primary schools locally to start pupils off before secondary transfer. Those who opt for music as their speciality on entering Highbury Grove are given a wider range of instrument choices, and for everyone there are orchestras, ensembles, bands and choirs. But wouldn't electric guitars, synthesisers and computer-generated sounds be more familiar, and perhaps more appealing, to the pupils than classical music and the traditional instruments of the orchestra? "It is about opening doors, giving them the chance to develop an interest and their own ability, and then we find the passion comes," explains Brown. There is nothing to match the vibrations that come through a raw, acoustic instrument. It is not, he stresses, that this is some prissy conservatory from which all contemporary sounds are banished as vulgar. There is too much of a buzz about Highbury Grove to make that possible, even if he wanted it. Some of the pupils, he says, have been working on a version of Pachelbel's Canon that mixes Baroque 17th-century music with sampling from We Dance On by hip-hop crew N-Dubz (which included X Factor judge Tulisa). "We make classical music cool," he jokes. He is very serious, though, about the wider educational benefits that such a concentration on music has brought to the school. Every task in music is approached in the round. So, as well as studying a piece of music, we will also study how the ear works in Biology, or sound waves in Science, or the history of the period when it was written. It all has a practical basis in the daily life of the school. We're preparing pieces for Remembrance Sunday right now, and music again provides a way into understanding a commemoration that is very important in our culture, but a bit of a mystery for those of our pupils whose families have arrived in this country very recently. If it is all sounding too good to be true, you don't just have to take Brown's word - or those of the pupils - for the bigger benefits that music has brought to the school. Ofsted has visited, awarded Highbury Grove an "outstanding" rating and praised in particular the music programme for the sense of community it engendered with everyone working and learning together. Examination results are improving rapidly and the school is now heavily oversubscribed, with five candidates for every place. It is even beginning to attract applications from sections of the local community that previously would have given it the widest of berths. "It all goes to show," Brown reflects, "that the skills involved in classical music are very transferable across the curriculum."