The shocking truth about state schools: they're good What school could this be? A school that next year - after a £70m rebuild - will boast an Olympic swimming pool and playing fields. Its students have toured with the English National Ballet in China, the cricket team has played at Lord's. It's also a school where 30 per cent of the 1,380 pupils have free school meals, 50 per cent have English as a second language, and it is a couple of miles from the former home of David Cameron - who once claimed to be "terrified" at the prospect of secondary schooling his children. This is Holland Park School, opened in 1958 as one of London's first purpose-built comprehensives as envisaged by the Education Act of 1944. Although feted at first for its utopian message - Tony Benn pulled his two sons out of Westminster to send them here; cabinet minister Roy Jenkins's son joined the sixth form from Winchester; and the actress Anjelica Huston attended - the school deteriorated. By the Eighties, as The Good Schools" Guide puts it, "cool turned to chaos." Uniform and "unfair" streaming were abolished; and the adjoining park's trees sheltered joint-smoking and fighting truants. "I was scared of them in their tracksuits," recalls Matilda Wickham, a current 15 year-old, Year 11 pupil, who grew up just yards away. We used to hide away from them. While the inhabitants of the neighbouring £10m houses chauffeured their children to private schools, the school on their doorstep struggled even to fill its places with children from surrounding housing estates. Nearly 50 years after Holland Park's founding, all over the country, the story seems to be the same. With the dust still settling from National Offers Day last week, when parents learnt what secondary school their child had been allocated, the demonising of "bog-standard" comprehensives, to use Alastair Campbell's phrase, is unrelentless. From moving to a more desirable catchment area to finding religion to win a place in a church school, many parents will do anything to avoid their local, free school. Over the past 20 years the proportion of British children educated privately has remained constant, at around 7 per cent - 10 per cent in London. But almost imperceptibly, things may be changing. Average school fees have risen by more than 40 per cent over five years, and with mortgages hard to come by, most people can no longer move into the catchment of high-performing schools. The result, according to Janette Wallis of The Good Schools" Guide, is that half the parents who phone its advice line now ask about state schools, compared to 10 per cent, five years ago. The interest, she says, is primarily money-driven, but has also been spurred by the publicity surrounding the Free Schools movement, allowing groups of parents to set up their own schools, and the transformation of many comprehensives into academies with greater control of their budgets and curriculum. Parents are also studying league tables, which reveal some "outstanding schools in the state sector getting outstanding results. People who might never have considered state education are now thinking, "Well, let's at least take a look,"" Ms Wallis says. Matilda Wickham's parents did exactly that. Her father, Rupert, a theatre producer, was educated at the fee-paying University College School, despite it being a 10-mile round trip from his home, and his father was an old Etonian (and head boy, to boot). But Mr Wickham chose to send Matilda to Holland Park. "Matilda made it clear that it was her first choice," he says. I was concerned; her first day is etched in my memory, wondering if she'd come back. But she has thrived. Indeed, she's garnered six A* and three A-grade GCSEs a year early and is taking three more this year. "She has a group of friends who seem to be very much the kind of friends you would like her to have," her father says. The knowledge that Oxbridge and the top-performing "Russell Group" universities are actively seeking comprehensive pupils also encourages parents. They can be further cheered by a 2008 report into 248 white, middle-class children who were sent, for ideological reasons, to their local average or poorly performing school. The vast majority enjoyed school and were fawned over by teachers, delighted by such compliant pupils. All went to university and 15 per cent won Oxbridge places. But still, many parents are, like Cameron, "terrified." Some watching the recent Channel 4 documentary Educating Essex were wowed by the dedication of the teachers at Passmores Academy in Harlow. But others saw the bullying, pregnancies and disruptive children as emblematic of everything that is wrong with a system educating all walks of life. Britain still has a high number of under-achieving state schools. A study, published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2010, found that Britain had plummeted down worldwide education rankings, falling behind such relatively poor nations as Estonia and Poland in reading, maths and science. Many parents also assume state schools have low expectations of their pupils, an attitude seemingly encapsulated by a recent article in the Times Educational Supplement by a teacher at a Norfolk sixth-form college, who criticised a pupil striving for As, adding, "What is better: to go to Cambridge with three As and hate it or to go to Bangor with three Cs and love it?" But according to Francis Gilbert, who teaches English at a comprehensive, such dumbing down is now outdated. "Since I started teaching in the early Nineties, schools have become much better run and get much better results," he says. A lot of money has gone into them - a lot has been wasted by bureaucrats - but in certain areas it's paid off. The key improvement, he says, has been in monitoring. A teacher that's drifting, not preparing lessons properly isn't going to survive. After its doldrum decades ("Standards are not high enough and behaviour is unruly" was Ofsted's verdict), Holland Park has been transformed by the current head Colin Hall. When he arrived in 2001, the halls were littered and the walls covered in graffiti; now they're covered in posters of the school's disciplinary code, in photos of teachers performing their termly Shakespeare play, and in accolades to children who have earned the much-coveted Present Tense award for outstanding achievement. What about the academic results? This is a truly comprehensive intake (the school ensures its intake is evenly distributed between four academic "bands"), yet, last year 98 per cent of pupils obtained five GCSEs at A*-C (compared to 70 per cent nationally), with 77 per cent of these including English and maths (58 per cent). At A-level, 35 per cent of grades achieved were A or A* - a higher proportion than at the closest selective co-ed private school to my house, where fees are £5,750 a term. The private school got two candidates into Oxbridge last year. So did Holland Park. Yet, although Holland Park's catchment has shrunk to just a mile, pupils who live on the doorstep still battle through London traffic to attend this private school. A handful of the area's merchant bankers send their children to Holland Park - and are delighted with the results - but, still, 47 per cent of children in the area are educated privately. There's a boy whose brother is at Eton. His parents made a choice to send him here, they watched the school and saw no reason why not, given the changes," says Mr Hall. But the idea still wouldn't occur to many people. I think parents think that by sending their children to private school, they are buying them some form of social safety. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees, even in the private system. Catherine, an osteopath from south London, nearly bankrupted herself to educate her son privately. I stupidly felt only uncaring parents used the state system. But my son's not academic, he ended up reading a Mickey Mouse subject at a silly university and working in a bar. In hindsight, I could have sent him to the local state school to end with the same result. Francis Gilbert chose the state system for his son after a brush with the alternative. Theo began education in a prep school, but by the time he was eight, he was being bullied and floundering academically. "There was an over-academic emphasis, with four-to-five year-olds sitting in silence and being made to read, when there is a lot of evidence that play is more appropriate at that age," he says. I had a visceral feeling those lessons were not appropriate. Theo was pulled out of the school and sent to his local primary. He arrived an average achiever, but when he left he was at the top. He benefited from learning by doing things, which is promoted in the state system, as opposed to the drilling and rote learning he was used to. At secondary level, Mr Gilbert sent Theo to the local comprehensive - now Bethnal Green Academy. Police vans were regularly seen outside the gates, and stories abounded about gang wars and drug deals. But Mr Gilbert was impressed by the teachers, the pupils and their willingness to improve things. His hunch was correct: BGA was recently named London's most-improved school. Like Holland Park and several others, including Perry Beeches in Birmingham and Phoenix High in Shepherd's Bush, west London, BGA was turned around by a visionary head teacher. Indeed, schools that have hit rock-bottom are now often targeted by the savviest middle-class parents who realise that the only way is up. The Royal Society of Arts" chairman, Matthew Taylor, sent one child to a comprehensive which in 2008 was placed in "special measures." This wasn't a cynical gamble, but part of a passionate belief in equality. The other attends a school of which former Tory minister Oliver Letwin said he would rather "beg on the street" than have his child attend. "We decided on these schools because of a strongly held principle that society would be fairer and attainment greater if schools were more inclusive," he says. He admits it hasn't been perfect. There's no question in my mind that my children have done perfectly OK, but they would have done better at [nearby public school] Dulwich College. The facilities aren't as good and they haven't had the same level of academic reinforcement from their peers. Working hard and achieving gets you stick from other kids. Yet he insists it's been worthwhile. Would my children be the rounded individuals they are, citizens of London who get on with anyone they meet and not feel threatened by people of different social classes and backgrounds? He is speaking rhetorically, but the answer is actually less than clear. Mr Taylor's dream was the same as the parents in the study of middle-class pupils. In reality, however, the children mixed "virtually exclusively with other middle-class children." "Knowing the other is not the same as empathising," the report observed wryly. Back at Holland Park, Mr Hall is evangelical about his mission not being to bring everyone to the same level, but to instil fierce ambition in every child. Of course, not every school has a Mr Hall. "But even when they do, the challenge is getting a chunk of society to acknowledge that," says a teacher at one of London's top public schools. The challenge is to persuade a mother who likes to boast that Jemima goes to Roedean, to even step over the threshold of her local school. If she did, she could be amazed.