David Miller’s classroom at St Ninian’s High School in Bishopbriggs has never been a place where convention might pull up a chair. His innovative teaching style is woven around a central commitment. “Connection,” he says. “If you can’t connect with pupils, you can’t teach them.”

Miller uses film, music, and the work of famous painters to broaden the impact of literature and poetry on his pupils. In one class, the use of photographs and movie clips as reference points for Robert Frost’s poem about the accidental death of a child, Out, Out -, prompted a spontaneous round of applause.

It also helped to earn him the most coveted title in his profession. Last week he was named Secondary Teacher of the Year in the UK Teaching Awards in London. His achievement is all the more remarkable because, at 46, he has only been doing the job for six years.

“I’ll introduce the image and encourage the kids to be aware of the verbal and linguistic story around a picture,” Miller explains. “I then blend the words with the picture. Children learn in so many different ways and it works extremely well for poetry. It’s about variety in the classroom.”

The judges praised his creative use of technology, and the quality of the interaction between Miller and his class. After collecting his award last Sunday — the first Scot to achieve the accolade — warm testaments to Miller’s accomplishment as an educator flowed from his pupils and former pupils. The tributes were infused with a genuine feeling of tender reverence. One child talked of Miller’s infectious passion, another of his honour, compassion and patience. A parent described his qualities as inspirational. Former pupils remain in contact with him, discussing career plans and final-year university dissertations.

In class, he has occasionally been moved to tears by a passage he is reading aloud and the sheer sincerity of this response is the hand with which he reaches out to connect with them.

“I treat the text with emotional and intellectual integrity, with no apology or embarrassment,” he says. “I cry spontaneously when reading some of the language, because it’s so powerful. You can hear a pin drop and the kids don’t get embarrassed, even though you would expect teenagers to sit there and say, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing?’ They’re all transfixed while they wait for me to recover, or I’ll pass it on to a pupil to read. I don’t do it for dramatic effect, none of it is staged.”

This fervour is an expression of the gregarious vivacity of his nature. As we sit in his empty classroom, Miller’s soft voice seems to animate the still air. He is a theatrical character. When a female teacher peers round the door to congratulate him, he beams: “Hello darling, I’ll give you a hug later.”

He is refreshingly unbound by political correctness. His pupils are accustomed to being called “pet”, and he refers to the colleague who put him forward for the award as his “nominatrix”. There is a youthfulness in his smooth face and thin frame despite the lightly greying hair.

At 46, Miller is a keen tennis player and climber, the latter a hobby he introduced to his pupils when he decided to take it up himself.

Everybody who works with him, whether as a colleague or a pupil, seems captivated by him. At the end of his probationary year at Vale of Leven secondary school in Dunbartonshire, Miller accompanied a school trip to Paris and the pupils pooled their spending money to buy him a present. At St Ninian’s, a colleague in the English department, a teacher for 32 years, was so fascinated by the multimedia aspects of his lessons that she introduced them to her own.

“It’s hard talking about yourself in this way, but I think I have a quality, I mean I’m obviously not Mr Macho Man, that’s clear, and I have a very gentle style with people, but rigorous and energetic,” he says.

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