Luke Sandison and his friends might be any Scottish teenagers. Leaving home without their mobiles or iPods is simply not an option.

But unlike many of their peers, once these boys reach the gates of their school, their electronic lifelines are handed in. If Luke gets homesick for his family in Aberdeen during the 10-week term, he will have to use an old-fashioned payphone to call them.

There is no television here, except when it is used in lessons. Each day begins with a mass. The masters wear gowns and the boys must stand when they enter the room. The rigorous curriculum features theology, classical history and ancient Greek, and daily sports pursuits include boxing and cross country.

It is clear that 13-year-old Luke does not attend any ordinary school. Rather, he is a pupil at Chavagnes International College, a strict, ultra-orthodox Catholic boys boarding school. It was set up by a former Edinburgh University student, Ferdi McDermott, and models itself on pre-Reformation establishments such as Eton and Winchester, aiming to produce the modern equivalent of Christian knights.

Contrast this with Scotland’s state schools where the full extent of the classroom discipline problem was laid out last week by the education inspectorate. Its members found that disruption was so bad at one in 12 secondaries that it was seriously hampering the studies of its pupils. There were 39,000 exclusions, a rise of 7% on the previous year, and more than a third of secondary teachers were ignorant of the Scottish executive’s flagship Better Behaviour, Better Learning programme.

These statistics alone might have been bad enough. But their effect was multiplied because they followed hard on the heels of an astonishing mea culpa last month from Jack McConnell, when the first minister claimed that trendy liberal teaching overseen by Labour councils from the 1980s had failed a generation of Scottish school- children.

Small wonder, you might think, parents are beginning to look elsewhere. And no surprise perhaps that some — albeit a trickle — are beginning to consider the austere regime at Chavagnes to ween their children off the indiscipline of today’s Scottish schools.

Once described as a Catholic Hogwarts, the 42 mainly British boys at Chavagnes are still given lines, essays and even “punishment runs” if they misbehave. Set deep in rural France, the school describes its mission as “the salvation of souls” and has a “specific intention to form young Christian gentlemen, heirs to the best traditions of Christian knighthood”.

For its founder, the decline in educational standards had simply gone far enough, and was across the board, in both the public and private sector. In the belief that Britain’s Catholic schools were watering down their spiritual teaching to attract rich students of other faiths, McDermott set up Chavagnes with a small coterie of deeply conservative Catholic educationalists in a village near the Loire Valley in 2002.

Many will see this return to a traditional public school system as a reactionary step, but McDermott, 33, believes growing parental concern about falling school discipline means the tide is turning his way.

“The kinds of parents who send their kids to our school would be concerned that their children were watching bad videos or listening to Eminem and getting into superficial habits and the trash culture,” he argues. “We are trying to give boys a respite from pop culture, to engage them in a traditional education so they can receive and pass on our Christian culture.”

Luke, the eldest of four children born to the Aberdeen-based devout Catholics Marie and William Sandison, says he enjoys the school, despite the 6.45am call to mass. Like almost all of his friends, he sings in the choir and spends his evenings playing football and running.

“I enjoy the mass, it’s a religious school,” shrugs Luke when asked. “I prefer this school because I am getting taught better. There are less people at the school so there is not a lot of shouting in class.”

Despite having boarded for more than a year now, he admits he’s not keen on the food and still gets homesick. But this autumn his younger brother Adam will be joining him. He’s looking forward to it.

Luke’s parents decided to send him to Chavagnes because of an absence of local Catholic secondaries and, they say, worries about drugs and discipline in some of the local non-denominational schools.

“We wanted to put him in an environment and culture that would instill in him the beliefs of the church,” says Marie, who works for a learning institute attached to the Catholic church.

“You can have the best education in the world but if you don’t have strong moral values, you don’t have that balanced outlook on life.”

When the school first opened in September 2002, there were just 10 pupils. Now numbers have quadrupled. Boys are taught in classes of seven and many sit exams one or two years ahead of schedule — one group is taking GCSE Spanish from scratch in one year. The first three graduates this year have been offered places at Oxford, University College Wales, and Ave Maria University in America.

McDermott, who founded a Catholic publishing company, hoped to set up his dream school in Britain but he was unable to find a property cheap enough. The building he finally found has had a chequered history: it was founded as a junior seminary in 1802, but closed down a century later because of state persecution. It reopened as a Catholic college in the 1970s only to close once more in the 1990s.

Now with its new order of daily mass and fortnightly confessions, McDermott believes that Chavagnes is far stricter than any British-based Catholic public school. Last month he was on a UK-wide recruitment drive for the school, including open nights in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, where there was strong interest. He believes the philosophy of respect for God, discipline and authority is an idea that is finally coming back into fashion.

“Most parents see a need to return to authority because the problems of society are to do with a lack of respect for authority and tradition,” he says. “I think we might be on the crest of a wave.”

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