School’s out, and despite the incessant drizzle there’s a festive air in the brightly lit buildings as the boarders prepare to go home for Christmas.

The talk is of low teas and exeats, of cross-country runs and the school musical. Groomed pupils wheel expensive suit-cases out to the lodge across the lawns.

But three students at this top private school are heading for Christmas in homes in one of the most deprived parts of the country, Newham in the East End of London, where teenagers have been murdered in gang wars and broken homes are the norm rather than the exception.

Earlier this year, in a Pyg-malion-style experiment, Tosin Teriba, George Weller and Horatio Georgestone, all former pupils at Kingsford community school in Newham, were each awarded a free place in the sixth form at Brighton college, worth an annual £24,000 each in fees.

After three months, punctuated only by the occasional weekend visit home, they have come to the end of their first term as boarders.

Glittering vistas beckon for three bright children suddenly offered a fast track to middle-class prosperity – there is talk of trying for Oxford or Cambridge, of careers their parents could only dream of. But how difficult has it been to settle into a boarding school full of rich kids when you come, as some might say, from the wrong side of the tracks?

After all, over them looms the best-known case of a private school giving a place to someone from a poor background – the story of Ryan Bell. When a televi-sion company making a documentary about his progress paid for Bell, then 14, to attend Downside, the Catholic boarding school in Somerset, the council estate child prospered at first, becoming a Latin scholar and excelling at sport. Within two years, however, he had been expelled after a drinking session landed him in hospital.

“There’s been nothing like Bell here,” says Richard Cairns, Brighton college’s headmaster. “There has been no trouble with these children. In fact, if you were to ask the sixth-formers to name their 10 favourite pupils, all three would be on the list.”

Certainly Tosin, a warm chatty girl from a single-parent Nigerian family, has a string of friends. Sitting on a squashy sofa in the head’s office, she rattles forth. She’s already got a reputation for being a “bit of a party animal” as Cairns puts it. “Have you been encouraging the boys to fire water pistols?” he asks her, only half-jokingly.

Home for Tosin is a house on an estate near Beckton, with her Nigerian mother, her sister, 12, and brother, 15, both still pupils at Kingsford. Christmas will be an extended family affair – and telly-watching as well as revision for her imminent AS exams in January will loom large for Tosin in the holidays.

“Coming to school here was a big shock at first,” she admits. “The most difficult thing was not seeing my family and friends and the shock of not sleeping at home.” In the end her mum had to stop putting credit on her mobile because Tosin kept phoning home in prep sessions.

The gap between her previous and new life loomed large in the early weeks. When she talked to other teenagers at the college about her friend from Kingsford, Adam Regis, murdered at the age of 15 in a knife attack earlier this year, “they were really shocked and confused. Everything is happy here, life is all roses, they aren’t used to things like that”.

But Tosin settled in, throwing herself into Sweet Charity, the school musical, becoming a charity rep organising a sponsored silence – “They think I can’t keep quiet,” she quips – and spending evenings after prep “chilling on the benches in front of our house and chatting”.

Horatio too, who is dreaming of a place studying PPE at Oxford, has immersed himself in the college’s social and sporting activities. “Public speaking, dance, rugby, young entrepreneurs, Christian Union,” he reels off. Back home he took part in Newham’s youth parliament and played basketball.

Only George is less interested in the extracurricular side of things. Acknowledged by Cairns to be one of the cleverest boys in the school, he’s predicted straight As in his four maths and science A-levels.

One of the biggest differences George has noticed is the longer school day. At Kingsford, which rescheduled the timetable to avoid the problems of a long lunch break, the gates closed at 2pm and the children would hang around each other’s houses or the streets before going home to try to get motivated for homework. At Brighton every minute of the day is organised, from breakfast at 7.45am to the supervised prep sessions each evening. “It’s easier, you don’t get distracted,” says George.

The pupils are fiercely protective of their families but you can see them emerging with their own dreams from the shadow of their former lives. Tosin enrolled on the drama A-level, even though her mum, who is support-ive of her daughter’s scholarship, wanted her to pursue only academic qualifications. She is also taking Mandarin, French, business studies and politics.

Horatio, who is taking five AS-levels, is making plans for a gap year after university. Quietly spoken George is visibly more confident at the end of this first term.

As the teenagers head home, all are adamant they will return. “Some teachers had their doubts about this,” admits Cairns. “They thought it was a social experiment that I had not thought through. But it’s working. And we will do it again for other children.”

Britain’s top 2,000 schools online

Go to parentpower for the full 2007 Sunday Times survey of Britain’s best state and independent schools. Find all the top secondary, primary and preparatory schools in your area simply by typing your postcode into our online database. You can also search by school name, town, region and education authority. As well as displaying all the recent exam results for each school there are links on Parent Power to take you straight to the latest inspection report and the school website.

Free Hamlet download A 240-minute recording of Hamlet, with Sir John Gielgud, is free to download from Times Online. Plus you can save up to £20 on more A-level set texts.

Times Recommends

• UK regional accents thrive against the odds
• ‘Scarecrow’ wind farms put rare birds to flight
• What an anti-climax: G-spot is a myth