Justin Shaw’s first novel is about a teenager called Merton who sells drugs, endures savage beatings from his mother’s thug of a boyfriend – and loves reading. The school that might save Marcus from a life behind bars is infested with bullies and disaffected teachers and as bleak a place as the benighted London estate on which he lives.

It’s a picture drawn from observation. Shaw, a Cambridge philosophy graduate, who works with the think tank Civitas, has helped set up evening classes in inner cities for children whose rough state education has failed to give them either an academic or a social pathway to a better life.

“Knowledge is a universal human thirst,” says Shaw, 40, who is public-school-educated. “It’s as simple as that. Fifty years ago in this country there was a consensus: children needed to be able to read and to add up and to have some knowledge of their own history, geography, the general world. That has gone.” Lacking such tools, youngsters find themselves jobless and without a moral compass, he believes. “I’m interested in education as a way of achieving humanity, understanding the world with the heart and the head.”

Four years ago, with his fellow think-tankers Robert Whelan and David Green, Shaw decided to take his theorising a step further. In a church hall in Kensington and Chelsea, the trio created a tiny primary school. Maple Walk would focus on teaching young children to read, write and do sums. It would also instil good manners and morals, a task some state schools manage but too many do not. “We could publish books about what is wrong with schools from now to eternity, but nothing was changing. So we thought we’d do it for ourselves,” says Whelan.

Last Tuesday, as Michael Gove, the shadow education spokesman, stood up at the Conservative party conference and outlined a startling vision of up to 5,000 new schools across Britain, run by parents, charities and private firms, 80 four to seven-year-olds were greeting their teachers with a polite handshake and settling down to lessons at Maple Walk. Gove may have been inspired by the revolution in education that has taken place in Sweden (where 900 independently run schools have been set up in 15 years) but here was the Swedish model writ large in the heart of London.

In 2004, when the small doors first opened at the side of the church in which Maple Walk is still housed, only two brave parents sent their four-year-olds up the steep steps to the improvised classroom. Now the little school, run by head teacher Sarah Knollys, is oversubscribed, with a waiting list of 350. “Parents are even registering unborn children,” says Whelan. “Last term, one mum wrote TBA in the space for the child’s name.”

Does he agree that Maple Walk is a blueprint for what the Conservatives plan to do if they sweep to power at the next elec-tion? “Yes, it is,” says Whelan. “If they are going to follow what happened in Sweden, where you had lots of small independent schools coming online, then yes, it is a model for that. If there is to be radical change, there will have to be many more schools like us.” Before making his speech last week, Gove had in fact held long discussions with the Civitas think-tankers. Both Gove and David Cameron, the party leader, send their children to St Mary Abbot’s, a church school near Maple Walk, in Kensington.

“He was especially interested,” says Whelan, “in the difficulties we had encountered.” Green adds: “Behind the scenes, the Conservatives are working hard to remove problems to make it easier for parents, teachers and groups like us to set up new schools.” The only bone of contention Green has with Gove’s plans is that the schools would be funded by the taxpayer, whereas Maple Walk is paid for by parents, albeit at a relatively cheap rate.

So why has this experiment been so successful? Maple Walk is not a place where children are taught to salute the flag, though it does teach “the narrative” of British history. In offering small classes (10 pupils to each teacher), a focus on the “three Rs” and low fees, Maple Walk has – quite simply – stepped into the gap between overcrowded, rowdy state schools and expensive private ones.

There are three primary schools nearby but many parents have opted for this one. Children may be being taught in a church hall and a Portakabin, they may have to walk in a crocodile to the park at playtime, but – as Jenny Dyson, a parent, says – they are happy and they are learning.

Dyson, a journalist, moved her son Charlie, 7, from a “good” local state school because she felt the classes there were too large. “I couldn’t afford the fees at Notting Hill prep but we could find the £1,624 a term Maple Walk charges,” she says.

Now her daughter Dot, 4, is starting in reception, where she has a particular passion for the yoga lessons. Meanwhile, a friend of Dyson’s, on hearing about Maple Walk, has transferred her child from a state school with an overcrowded, frightening playground, while a third parent, novelist Nikki Gemmell, whose husband worked on Tony Blair’s 1997 election campaign, has switched her children from a “very expensive prep school”. “It is such a shame [so many people] can’t get a great education for their children that doesn’t cost a bomb,” says Dyson.

In fact Maple Walk has been so successful that the New Model School Company that Civitas set up to run the school is to open a second one in Canning Town, east London. It has also inspired others: the journalist Toby Young said last week that he was considering opening a similar school.

The school in Canning Town, which opens next autumn, will be built out of stacked shipping containers from China. There are also plans to open similar schools in Bradford, where the hope is that they will help to defuse the city’s racial tensions. “We will do our bit to show kids that if you have a good education, you can do anything you want,” says Whelan.

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