Jasper Conran, multi-millionaire fashion designer, still wakes racked by nightmares about his time at boarding school. “I had nightmares for years and years about school, about being back at school, even at the age of 44,” he says, slightly wildly. “I was a fat child, quiet, quite bullied, with little or no self confidence,” explains the now ultra-slim, exuberant Conran, waving a cigarette.

After his parents, bestselling author Shirley and design guru and restaurateur Terence, separated when he was two, Conran was sent to board, first, aged seven, at Port Regis, then at Bryanston in Dorset.

It was an unhappy time. His mother turned down his pleas to transfer to Holland Park comprehensive in London — “She said, ‘Darling, we don’t live near Holland Park, for a start’.” Conran took matters into his own hands.

Fifteen years old, in New York with Shirley to promote her book Superwoman, he refused to go back to Bryanston, threw his passport out of the hotel window and started at New York’s Parsons school of design. “I got the hell out,” he says.

Success came quickly after that but Conran has never forgotten his wretched school days — or how his talent for design was largely neglected. “When I started going to school people weren’t divorced. That was like being a freak. I got bullied for that. I have actually led a very privileged life. It does not mean, however, that I forget how it feels to be an outcast.”

We’re sitting in the cool calm of the London HQ of Conran’s fashion empire. Frantic preparations for London Fashion Week are going on somewhere else in the building but Conran is absolutely focused on his latest project. After a lifetime concentrating on building up his business and largely keeping out of the political arena, he has decided to put £2m of his own money (matched by an estimated £19m from the government) towards creating the first “design ” city academy in the country, a new secondary school in one of the poorer parts of London.

Although the school will teach the national curriculum and aim for high academic results, it will also specialise in design — garden, fashion and cookery design among others. This week the plans, hatched in secret over a year, will be unveiled to parents at the McEntee school in Waltham Forest (“Please don’t call it a failing school, it’s improving,” urges the head of school improvement for Waltham Forest, who is quietly sitting in on the interview).

McEntee is the school that will, by 2007, if the council agrees, be replaced by Conran’s vision. It will not, he says, firmly, be called the Jasper Conran school of design. Rather its working title is the Waltham Forest academy of design. “I’m not doing this because I want my name on a school.” He’s doing it because he’s been thinking about “making a contribution” for a long time — his initial idea was to set up a “super website” where children could research creative careers, the kind of careers counsellors never talk about.

“Normally in school it would be, ‘Yes, Tracy, you can do hairdressing’. But I want to add, ‘Do you know that that is not the only skill? You could be a wig maker and you could go round the world in Nicole Kidman’s wake doing the hair for films and plays’.”

He’s also doing it because it didn’t happen at school for him when he was young — although he does pay tribute to some teachers.

“There were these jewel-like people — my biology teacher at Bryanston, for instance, who did not think it was odd I should be drawing dresses in her class . . .” he breaks off, laughing.

Another was a friend’s mother who “took me to France and allowed us to stay up late and showed us beautiful things”. His passion for design was nurtured by such experiences.

So part of Conran’s vision for the new city academy is a network of staff primed to play the same inspirational role: to pick up on each child’s gift; the thing that “sparks” them, as he puts it.

“You need to see what hooks a child, what brings a child alive because I think every child has magic and I think it is up to society and parents to find that thing.”

Drawing on his experience of being bad at games, he also wants to introduce a range of rather different pursuits, “subtle outdoor exercise”, such as gardening.

“It may sound fey and trite,” he says, “but if you plant a seed which you nurture and then can see grow, it builds your confidence. You learn to look after something.”

He intends to bring a stream of “fab people” through the school too — theatre designers, architects, actors, fashion designers to talk to and enthuse the children. And he’s keen on Norman Foster designing the new school while he himself is up for helping the children design their own uniform.

Will the “fab people” include his parents? At this point Conran confesses that neither of them knows about his project.

“They have made their contribution to society. Obviously I lived with my father as a god and my mother as a goddess. But this is my project.”

Conran has been inspired by visits to another city academy — in Bexley, sponsored by his friend property developer David Garrard, who didn’t go to school until he was nine.

“The head at Bexley said that the thing that gets stolen at the school is food, not computers. A lot of these children are not fed at home.” Conran thumps the table. “You can bet your bottom dollar they are going to get very good food at my school — and plenty of it.”

He goes on: “I do not have that much spare cash but I have enough for my needs and I find myself at a time when I can do this. If at any time my wealth evaporates,” — he leans forward quickly and touches the wooden floor — “inshallah it won’t, I shall be able to point back and say . . . I did that.”