Thoughtful and quiet, George Weller, 17, is characteristically modest about his latest success. A former pupil at a tough East End school that has lost several teenagers to knife crime, last week he was offered a place to read natural sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

“My family were really pleased for me,” he says. “I’d like to think I’ve inspired my younger brother, if he wants to follow an academic route, to think that anything is possible.”

Weller is the first Oxbridge success among a group of children who were selected to take part in a Pygmalion-like schooling experiment. In 2006, along with two other pupils from Kingsford community school in Beckton, a comprehensive in one of the poorest, most crime-ridden parts of Britain, George was given the chance of a privileged private education. Brighton college waived its £24,000 boarding fees to offer him a free place in its sixth form.

Other schools have been pioneering similar schemes. Two years ago Rugby took two boys from the East End, while Eton is also offering scholarships. George, however, is the first of any of them to prove that such an experiment can succeed.

“At my last school I hadn’t thought about applying to Cambridge,” said George, whose offer is conditional on three As and a C at A-level. “All I have to do now is make sure I get the grades.”

Before this, the only attempt at transplanting a child from a rough comprehensive to an expensive boarding school had been a disaster. When a television company paid for the underprivileged black boy Ryan Bell, then 14, to attend Downside, the Catholic boarding school in Somerset, he prospered at first, excelling at Latin and sport. Within two years however, Bell had been expelled after a binge drinking session landed him in hospital.

George’s story could not be more different. One of 14 children from Kingsford to be interviewed for a free place three years ago, he had already been predicted A and A* grades at GCSE. He told the selection panel of Brighton college teachers that he was “fed up” with children messing around in lessons at Kingsford. “Some of them just can’t be bothered,” he said.

Brighton’s head teacher, Richard Cairns, who set up the scheme after meeting George’s head teacher Joan Deslandes “wanted to take them all”. In the end the panel chose three: George, Kingsford’s head boy Horatio Georgestone and a girl, Toisin Teriba, from a single-parent Nigerian family who live on a council estate. Toisin astonished the panel by describing how she had recently addressed a memorial service for Stephen Boachie, a former Kingsford pupil who had been stabbed to death on New Year’s Day in 2007. “I said at the service that we have to stand away from knife crime and drugs,” she said.

After being offered the scholarships, the trio, who are all now bound for university, returned to Kingsford to sit their GCSEs. Within weeks a classmate was dead, another victim of the spate of knifings sweeping the capital. Fifteen-year-old Adam Regis, nephew of the Olympic sprinter John Regis, was on his way back from the cinema one Saturday night just before the start of the GCSE exams, when he was knifed a few yards from his home. A video the Kingsford students made expressing their feelings about Adam’s death and their experiences at his funeral has been viewed by David Gold, one of the Brighton college staff. That sort of bereavement “is something no one should have to go through, let alone schoolkids”, he comments.

Although George brushes off questions about the difference between his new school and his old one, it’s stark. At the 1,500-pupil London school, where George’s 14-year-old brother is still being educated, fewer than half the pupils get five good GCSEs. Deslandes has introduced airport-style security checks, searching children for weapons in her office; all youngsters have to sign a pledge not to carry a knife and there’s a police officer on site. When the school gates close at 2pm, there’s nowhere to go and little to do. Kingsford sends nobody directly to university because it has no sixth form.

At Brighton college, by contrast, with its boarding houses and manicured lawns, every minute of the day is scheduled, from breakfast at 7.45am to the supervised two-hour prep sessions each evening. Nearly every pupil goes on to university and this year 18 have been offered places at Oxford or Cambridge. The talk is of “exeats” and “low tea”, pupils attend chapel every morning and gowns must be worn by prefects for formal occasions.

“I really did want to come here two years ago,” says George, who nevertheless remains extremely loyal to his previous school. “I just felt it was somewhere I could do well. I think coming to the college really has influenced my life.”

He was groomed for the Cambridge interviews in weekly sessions with other pupils, took free lessons in classical guitar, settled into boarding school routines and relished the time and attention teachers could give him.

Cairns says that George is very popular with the other pupils. “George is a legend,” he says. “He plays his guitar for the other kids . . . He’s very modest, that’s why the girls love him. They say to me, ‘He’s so brainy’.”

Cairns also reveals that although George’s mother didn’t at first want him to accept the scholarship - “she told me that it might change George’s life in the wrong direction” - his father (his parents are separated) turned out to be a keen supporter. “He pops down here, he’s very proud of his boy.”

Brighton denies that it set up the scheme under pressure from the Charity Commission to justify the school’s charitable status, and the associated tax breaks that go with it. Rather, says Cairns, he wanted to make a difference to the lives of children who would otherwise “never have thought” beyond the University of East London.

“Some teachers had their doubts about this,” says Cairns. “They thought it was a social experiment I had not thought through. But every year now we are taking two or three children from George’s old school on free places into the sixth form. It’s working.”

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