‘All my life I have been a dedicated musician,” says Julian Lloyd Webber, cellist and slightly less famous younger brother of Andrew Lloyd Webber. “But I know that there is more to life than just playing an instrument.”

We’re sitting in the mansion block in South Kensington where Lloyd Webber has lived since leaving college in the early 1970s. He’s invited me here to talk about his latest project - taking orchestral music to the most deprived children in the country. The project, In Harmony, is modelled on a similar scheme that has saved innumerable children from drug dealing, prostitution and other crime.

El Sistema was founded in Venezuela by José Antonio Abreu, an economist and musician. Today some 250,000 children take part in this scheme. Every child, no matter how poor, is offered an instrument and free tuition. Some are as young as two.

Like many others, Lloyd Webber was blown away when the flagship of El Sistema, the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra, played at the Proms last year. One newspaper reviewer was moved to ask: “Was this the greatest Prom of all time?”

However, Lloyd Webber is keen to emphasise that the project he’s running is not about hand-picking talent for what would amount, essentially, to a novelty orchestra. It’s about taking orchestral music to the masses.

“To be part of a symphony orchestra is the most extraordinary experience. The sum of the parts is greater than the individual. The teamwork has to be of the highest order . . . This is a totally new idea. It’s so different that I would not call it an educational programme - it’s a social one, with music as the catalyst for change.”

When people hear the name Lloyd Webber, he says, they tend to think of great riches. After all, Andrew in particular has been terrifically successful. “But my father was the son of a plumber, and I don’t feel disconnected from that,” says his brother. When he was a student at the Royal College of Music, most students were from state schools. Today, he says, they’re more likely to have been privately educated (as he was, despite his close links with manual work). “And that bothers me because all my life I have believed that music is for everyone. I have seen what music can do. It can change lives.

“When I was 11, having started with the cello at four, but not very seriously, I had a teacher who really inspired me. She took me to hear great cellists in London, in her own time. I had no parental pressure, though I was very lucky to be brought up in a musical family.” (His mother taught piano, and his father was a composer.) “If I had not been, and I’d not had that teacher, where could I have discovered music? It would have had to be at school, and music in schools has been missing for years.”

In the late 1990s, he says, music almost vanished from the school curriculum. Asked by pollsters to name a classical composer, many children said Britney Spears. “A lot of people have been lost to classical music who were never given the chance to experience it,” says Lloyd Webber.

Everywhere he went, music people fretted about this. So Lloyd Webber got together with James Galway, the flautist, and Evelyn Glennie, the percussionist, and formed the Music in Education Con-sortium to lobby the government. Five years ago they went to see Charles Clarke, then education secretary, and David Miliband, then a schools minister. “Clarke said, ‘We know why you are here and we know there is a problem’,” he recalls.

Shortly afterwards, Miliband developed a music manifesto, but Lloyd Webber was critical at first. “There was no money behind it. We made that point, and in fairness to the government they have come up with the highest level of funding for years – £332m. And this new project, In Harmony, is the most interesting part to me.” (The other funding, although welcome, is going to traditional lessons.)

Scotland, which has its own education system, has already started working with the Venezuelans on establishing its own version of El Sistema. Lloyd Webber visited the Scottish pilot scheme at Raploch in Stirling, one of the most deprived communities in Britain. “I did a class with the young children,” he says. “I did a bit of Shostakovich, really aggressive stuff, and they were asked to show what it meant to them. So all these five-year-olds sort of marched about. Then I did other things that were slower and beautiful, and they danced to those, too.”

For now the teaching is all done at a community centre. “They want to take the instruments home - ‘When can we show mummy and daddy?’ they say - but they are not allowed.” One reason for that is security - it would not help the cause if the instruments were stolen. “We will not buy them a Stradivarius. These will be workable, serviceable instruments, in some cases only 1/8th the normal size. But the project will cost money and the teachers need to be paid, which is where the government money comes in.”

Lloyd Webber’s steering committee advertised for groups interested in running one of three pilot schemes. The pilots, due to start early next year, will have two years to show results.

“We have not got long. There is no great symphony orchestra coming out of it in two years, that’s for sure. How can we demonstrate success? Well, it was already evident when I went to Stirling that a change is taking place, and that only started in June.”

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