Choir: Gareth Malone. Gareth Malone

of The Choir and I think that had given her the belief to persuade Paul Craven, the headteacher, to let me come into the school. She says, ‘Paul thought it was a good idea, although some of the staff were a little reticent. They thought it might be a Panorama documentary into inner-city schools.’

      Where technology had been at the heart of Northolt High School, sport was one of the driving forces at Lancaster School. Lewis Meagor, a floppy-haired cherubic boy with all the promise of an all-rounder, commented that singing ‘wasn’t the cool thing to do. Everything was about football, basketball, rugby, cricket. Sport, sport, sport.’

      The sports department had their own separate building. Once I’d got out on the sports field, a lot of this department became the lifeblood of the staff choir, but initially there was suspicion on both sides. Schools are like marketplaces: each department has to fight to be heard. The teaching staff are obliged to concentrate so much on results and making sure that the basics are covered – that the maths department is functioning, that the English department is covering the curriculum – that it seems to me that knowledge is in danger of becoming segregated, which happens less in the real world.

      Music, however, is a wonderfully multi-faceted discipline, involving history, technology and science, to name but a few elements; so I believe quite strongly that separating this subject from the others is artificial. When I was at school it was certainly like that. From what I remember, I don’t think there was very much love lost between my wonderful and inspiring music teacher, Stephen Carleston, and the head of sports, who also made me feel like the enemy. This project would be about settling some old scores.

      So with this in mind, it felt rather predictable to come into this school in Leicester where sport and music were based in different buildings and both sets of staff were trying to timetable things at the same time. It felt as if the music department would never leave the comfort zone of their own classrooms to go over to the sports department – and vice versa – to say, ‘Is there any way we could make this work?’ None of them had any spare time. They all had so many obligations.

      I had a unique opportunity to go in to see the sports guys and say, ‘Well, why don’t you have Tuesday and I’ll have Wednesday?’ so that the boys who were good at sports and music could do both. In that environment, this way of thinking felt quite unusual, even revolutionary. The same divide goes on in the kids’ minds as well: you are either a ‘sports’ kid or a ‘music’ kid. My point of view was, ‘Why not be both? They are not mutually exclusive.’

      However, we all had a lot to learn. When I decided to start up a staff choir, I was amazed at the variety of excuses the staff members came up with not to attend the first rehearsal. My favourite was the joyous individual who, when I accosted him and asked, ‘Are you going to come to staff choir?’ gave me a point blank, ‘No!’ ‘Why not?’ I asked. His answer will stay with me for a long time as the most unexpected I have ever heard. Without missing a beat he said, ‘Horses …’.

      But the weeks went by and the resistance of the boys was impressive. In some of the lessons I began to get an unpleasant hotness in my ears that reminded me of being told off by the teacher when I was eight years old. The boys knew how to push, push, push until they found a weak spot. I was out on a limb and flailing about. The seemingly insurmountable difficulty of trying to create a choir while implementing singing across the curriculum started to dawn on me. Florian Gassmann’s words rang in my ears. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this teaching malarkey after all.