It’s a tale to raise the spirits of any football-mad British teenager – and reassure any parent. Seven pupils from one Tyneside school have won “soccer scholarships” to American universities worth $1m (£500,000) in total.

Phil Bannister and Eddie Dines will jet off in August for Loyola College in Baltimore; Chris Jewels is going to Fairfield University in Connecticut along with Paul King, who has deferred his place for a year; and Liam McPeake, Daniel Iredale and Tom Wilson head to Wesleyan College in North Carolina.

All will play for their university football teams while studying for a degree and all have been awarded four-year scholarships worth between £15,000 and £25,000 a year.

Dines, 18, summed up their feelings last week when he said: “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. My parents are totally supportive. They are happy I am getting a degree to fall back on as well as doing the football.”

Encouraged by their American headmaster, Paul Kelley, the seven boys, all pupils at Monkseaton community high school in Whitley Bay, are following in the footsteps of Laura Spence, the school’s most famous old girl, who also opted for an American rather than a British university.

Spence went to Harvard on a scholarship worth tens of thousands of pounds after being rejected by Oxford in a case that made headlines when the chancellor Gordon Brown came to her defence, blaming the university’s “old boy network”. She is now doing a medical degree at Cambridge.

Kelley, who attacked Oxford for turning Spence down seven years ago, repeats his criticism in his new book, Making Minds, to be published later this year. Spence’s record since then speaks for itself, said Kelley last week.

“Oxford made a mistake. In the most selective university in the world, Laura got an award that only goes to five students in the whole of Harvard. Now she’s at Cambridge and doing well . . . A lousy admissions system will produce lousy answers.”

Now Kelley, who has been encouraging his pupils to go Stateside for the past 15 years, is turning his guns on the failure of British schools to take sporting talent seriously. He warns that Britain will flop in the Olympics unless it tries harder to train athletes when they are young – and urges them to follow the example of American universities and schools, where pupils have to do well in academic lessons alongside intensive physical, nutrition and skills training in their chosen sport.

“British schools and universities simply do not recognise sporting excellence in the way US universities and schools do,” he said. “It is a different mindset. Schools here do not give sport the same status as academic pursuits. We have to create a different pattern of learning in Britain that gives sport the credit it deserves.”

At Monkseaton where, according to Kelley, “there is a passion for football”, the head has set up an academy where pupils can undertake football training interspersed with conventional academic classes. Run by former Ipswich Town player and Sunderland coach Danny Olson, the academy follows training methods close to those of professional institutes such as the Spartak tennis club in Moscow.

All seven boys are members of the academy and of the school’s football team. Olson says that as the success of the team grows so American coaches are flocking to watch the boys train.

“We had a dozen coaches from America here in the first three months of this year to see the boys play and meet their families,” he said.

“In this country, if you are a good sportsman it doesn’t count at school. Some of our kids may not be the brightest boys in the world but they have football talent so we push them. We say if you are a little bit more attentive in class and your grades are good you can build a life in America.” Dines said he switched schools to join the academy at Monkseaton where he trains every day for two to three hours. Pupils also take part in body analysis tests to identify their body composition as well as muscle groups that need working on.

“These boys will get a degree as well as sports provision that will set them on the road to a good salary,” said Kelley. “If you put the package together right you will get exceptional results. All these boys, who live within 10 to 12 miles of this school in the middle of nowhere, have generated this exceptional performance in terms of getting to US universities. By learning from other countries we are doing things better.”

Kelley, a father of four, whose school is built near former coalmines and who has seen bits of the football pitch disappear into the old workings, said the ambition of winning a sports scholarship can transform pupils who might otherwise have left school at 16. “You see them switching from kebabs to vegetables,” he said. “They change physically and their behav-iour and attitude around school changes.”

Certainly the seven boys beat fierce competition to land the scholarships. Bannister said that the coach from Loyola revealed that the university had signed only “six or seven boys to soccer scholarships this year, two from Monkseaton, the rest from America”. Bannister and Wilson are both under18 England internationals.

And they agree that their success was at least partly thanks to the training academy. “It encourages people to stay at school because they are enjoying the football as well as doing the lessons,” said Bannister, who hopes to stay in America after his accountancy degree and turn professional.

Earlier this month the Monkseaton team hammered Millfield, the private school in Somerset probably best known for its sporting excellence, 4-0 in the English schools FA final. “Our teachers were saying it was rich kids versus the poor ones.” said King.

The moral of their story? A passion for football doesn’t have to be at the expense of good A-levels and a university degree. “Other schools could do what we have done and it would make a huge difference to the country,” said Kelley.

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