If these "ideologies and prejudices" had a soundtrack, it may well have been the 1979 anti-authority anthem "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)". Roger Walters's song was a revolt against formal teaching, in particular the "oppressive" education he received at the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys during the Fifties. In the accompanying video, Gerald Scarfe provided a cartoon of a demonic, cane-wielding teacher feeding children through a school-shaped meat-mincer. A group of London schoolchildren provided the chorus, singing: "We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom . . . Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone."

The song was recorded just off Upper Street, and the children were recruited from the nearby Islington Green Comprehensive School. However, while Walters's song was a protest against his strict Fifties grammar school, the education these children were receiving in 1979 was very different indeed. A testbed of progressive education, Islington Green Comprehensive had an established reputation for chaotic behaviour and dreadful academic results. A new head, Communist Party member Margaret Maden, had been drafted in to turn the school around. Unfortunately her approach, in her own words "informal but not sloppy", appeared to offer more of the same.

Maden employed as music teacher Alun Renshaw, a maverick figure who chain-smoked in lessons, swore at pupils, and encouraged his classes to tour the school making music by banging on the walls. He also organised the choir to sing for Pink Floyd.

 In 2007, a BBC documentary reunited the choir, and there was a palpable sense they had been let down by their school. One former pupil, the daughter of a consultant psychiatrist, recalled, "I don't think I learned anywhere near as much as I could have done. I was quite bright, I think obviously if it had been a far more disciplined school then an awful lot more time would have been taken up with teaching and much less with crowd control. Come the end of the fifth year I was desperate to get out. I just wanted to leave." Aged 40, she was doing four jobs to afford the fees at her son's independent prep school.

There was one Islington comprehensive school that valiantly swam against this progressive tide. The headmaster, a northern Methodist with a thick Lancashire accent and distinctive mutton-chop whiskers, was Rhodes Boyson. He would go on to achieve national fame as a socially conservative Tory MP in the Thatcher era, but in 1967 Boyson was a former Labour councillor and founding member of the Comprehensive Schools Committee. That year, he established Highbury Grove School as a single-sex comprehensive school aimed at "giving many more boys the opportunity of academic achievements".

Highbury Grove amalgamated three schools, but tellingly retained the smart blazers, badges and ties of Highbury Grammar School. Boyson aimed to fulfil Harold Wilson's original vision of the comprehensive as a "grammar school for all", so Highbury Grove had a house system, strict discipline, lots of sport, academic streaming and a curriculum stretching from Latin to motor engineering. The school gained excellent examination results and was continually oversubscribed.