What happens when very young men fall out of the bottom of the education system? Some of the more obvious answers can be found in broad daylight on a busy street in North London, in the shadow of the Spurs football ground. A bunch of teenage boys, some of them hooded, are hanging out by the railings near the shops. A dealer arrives and hands one of them a phone. It contains drugs, but doesn’t look incriminating if caught on a camera. The boy vanishes. When he returns and hands the phone back, it contains money.

The mobiles harbour other things – scenes that, despite their low-pixel graininess, are all too vivid: a group beating up a single victim; a young man scaling a drainpipe to the sixth floor of a block of flats and going in through the window. A few seconds later, out flies a TV set. Having trashed the flat, the figure reappears and shins back down while his friends laugh and cheer. The footage then circulates with greater speed than gossip ever managed.

These are some of the episodes described by teachers and youth leaders at a new academy that aims to give boys from this culture a last chance to change. They are doing this with a combination of basic schooling and sporting discipline. It started last year with just nine students. They are aged between 14 and 16, and have already been in trouble with the law. Some entered their teens without mastering single-digit adding and subtraction. What almost all have in common is that they have been excluded from schools for excluded pupils. Those establishments were once known as approved schools, then pupil referral units and now pupil support centres.

However you name them, they didn’t work in the cases of these boys, and this bare classroom in a building off the high street is the very last of last-chance saloons. In another sense it is the first, founded just eight months ago, but already achieving such results that its student population is set to expand to 24 this autumn. The majority are from a culture of drugs and knives, and are going through or have gone through the youth justice system. One of them is absent, having got himself excluded even from here on account of threatening behaviour. But today he is said to be missing it, and wants to return.

There are 90-minute lessons, four times a week, in English and maths. It doesn’t sound much but it taxes the concentration spans of the students, particularly at the beginning. As one of the teachers says, they are so used to communicating through screens and texts that they panic and withdraw like addicts when they have to do without. Another of the scheme’s founders says that one of the great incentives is the sheer usefulness of literacy. He cites the case of a 15-year-old with whom he had worked. “He got on a bus and was told to get off as he didn’t have a ticket. He became abusive, swore, began a sit-in while the driver told him the bus wasn’t going anywhere while he was aboard. Now, just ten minutes earlier, I’d been teaching him the alphabet and he wasn’t a problem at all. What happened was that when he went to the shop to get his bus pass, they gave him a form, and he thought that was the pass. So wherever he goes, he’s going to be shouted at. The whole world yelling at him. At 15, that gets embarrassing.”

The key to the Tottenham initiative is to be found in the second word of its name, the London Boxing Academy Community Project. It is that controversial sport which arouses suspicions about the approach as much as it sparks enthusiasm in the participants. A stone’s throw from the classrooms is the famous Haringey gym in all its sweaty glory. World-class British boxers have trained here – Lloyd Honeyghan, the tragic Michael Watson, so grievously injured in the Chris Eubank fight of 1991, former national heavyweight champion Gary Mason. Once a gangsters’ haven, the place was shut down in the early Nineties and re-opened six years ago. The fact that the academy shares the facilities with the Haringey Police Community Boxing Club might look like a thumping irony if both did not have such an interest in its success.

The boys of the academy look at home here. One of their coaches is veteran boxing trainer Chris Hall, a no-nonsense sort of uncle with a passionate commitment to their rehabilitation. Working with him is the well-spoken and intellectual Simon Marcus, the epitome of an old English amateur of the pugilistic arts. You would be rash to pick a fight with these men, verbally or physically. It brings us to the hard heart of the matter – authority flows from physical prowess. The truth of this is undiminished in the first epoch to have produced a generation without the supposed deterrent of corporal punishment. Take it a step further and you could argue that the peace here is held by the possibility, however remote, of violence.

You could do no such thing, counters Chris Hall. “They fight already. Boys have always fought. This is about teaching them some discipline, some manners. It is also about using people whom they respect as role models.”

Simon Marcus’s defence is the best form – attack. “There’s rank hypocrisy about,” he says. “Education is entrusted to governments composed of sane, middle-class people who make moral judgments when it suits them, but who haven’t got education remotely right. How dare they take away children’s chances and then tell them, you offend my moral sensibilities by lacing on boxing gloves. Look at these kids’ expectations of drugs and crime and then compare that with the virtually irrelevant damage that carefully supervised boxing does. It doesn’t stack up, does it?”

At present the majority of boys at the academy are of Afro-Caribbean origin; yet race alone should not be made the scapegoat, says Hall, who is married to a Ghanaian. Nor should poverty. “In fact, I think one of the culprits is welfarism, the whole business of not needing to work in order to have what you need. Some migrants, asylum-seekers many of them, are the ones with the real hardship problems. But not all the rest. I wouldn’t refer to them as underprivileged.” The scheme receives funding for its academic work from the London-based organisation Civitas, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society. This body also contributes to a number of newly established supplementary schools designed for much younger children who are at risk of falling behind.

One of the 14-year-olds at the academy is Chevez from Bounds Green, who is among the 100 or more pupils who are excluded at any given time by Haringey’s mainstream schools. “When I was at the referral unit,” he says, “I just used to keep thinking, ‘Something’s going to happen, it’s going to go down really badly, and the boxing’s not going to work and it’s going to screw up.’”

He says the problem was anger. When he was angry, which he was for most of the time, he fought. And when he fought, he got even angrier. He says he doesn’t see his father much, because he lives far away. But there are eight older sisters, seven on his father’s side, and one on his mother’s. “They’ve been as supportive as they can, but I wouldn’t say they’ve been there all the time. They have to work.”

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