It’s 7.30 in the morning, and I’m in the forecourt of White Lodge, the Royal Ballet’s lower school, wondering if it’s as good as it looks. Britain is hardly short of fabulous old buildings that serve as centres of learning, but few are more appealing than this Grade I-listed Palladian villa, home to the Royal Ballet School since 1955.

As former royal residences go, it’s not overpoweringly grand. Set in the rolling grassland of Richmond Park, less than 10 miles from central London, White Lodge comes across as a comfy family seat that has been tastefully upgraded into a modern boutique hotel. Your first thought, as it emerges from behind a screen of trees, is to wonder why the royal family ever gave it up. Your second is to wish that you’d spent your adolescence studying in such a glorious place.

In the school’s spiffing new dining area — part of its recent redevelopment — I eat scrambled eggs with Grace and Tom, two bright-eyed 12-year-olds who smile a lot and only speak when spoken to. Carrot-top Tom looks like a pocket-sized footballer in his shiny blue tracksuit. Grace’s scraped-back hair and elegant way with a fork lend her a more balletic air, but neither of them mentions dance classes when I ask which lessons they are looking forward to today. Grace says she likes history. Tom is mad for science. This no doubt reflects the pride the school takes in its GCSE results: its most recent harvest of A and A+ grades was twice the national average.

Lest we forget though, that’s not why Tom and Grace are here. Both seem a bit young, frankly, to have made a decision about their careers, but this is in effect what all the 120-odd 11- to 16-year-olds at Britain’s premier ballet academy have done. The school’s declared policy is to only admit children with the talent and the motivation to become professional ballet dancers. “We are very clear about that,” the Royal Ballet School’s Australian director, Gailene Stock, informs me later in the day. “If we don’t feel a child has the necessary ability to go on and earn a living in classical ballet, they will be asked to leave.”

It’s a tough regime, but it achieves its objective. Every year, over 1,200 11-year-olds compete for around 25 places at White Lodge, a 1/50 acceptance ratio, which makes it one of the most selective secondary schools in the country. One in four is par for a top London independent.

The selection process doesn’t stop once you’ve got in. At the end of each year, a handful whose dancing is deemed not up to scratch will be, in White Lodge parlance, “assessed out”. After five years here, pupils who make the cut move on to the Royal Ballet’s senior school, adjoining the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden for three more years of rigorous training. Et voilà! In 2008, all of the students passing out of the senior school found jobs in ballet, either as dancers at the Royal Ballet itself, or in other companies around the world.

Like all of the children on the lower school roll, Tom and Grace are here purely on balletic merit. For fans of a classless society, this is a paradise. There are kids here from estates of both kinds — inner city and smart county — with a marked preponderance of the former. Fees are set at £30,675 per annum, but hardly anybody ever pays that because all parents are means-tested and only those earning over £178,950 are liable for the full whack. If your annual income is less than £11,475, your child’s time at White Lodge will cost you nothing. For the majority of the school’s current intake, who come from modest backgrounds, it costs hundreds rather than thousands per year to attend, the balance being paid by government grants. Though private trusts and donations help to fund White Lodge, and it is ranked as an independent school, half of the £22m spent on the recent expansion of its facilities came from the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

The catch is that since White Lodge recruits its pupils from all over the UK, and occasionally beyond, most are obliged to board. This prolonged separation from their homes, the first that most of the children will have experienced, can be a wrench. Grace, whose family live only a bus ride away in Twickenham, is one of the lucky ones: she returns home at weekends and every Wednesday night. Tom, who’s from Tadcaster in North Yorkshire, admits that at the beginning of his first term last September he missed his home badly. But neither of them objects to boarding in principle. “You do feel homesick at first,” Grace says firmly, “but you soon want to stay here because there’s so much going on.”

There sure is. Over the next 12 hours Grace and Tom will take classes in all the usual school subjects, which are referred to here as “academics”, as well as spending a minimum of two hours in one of White Lodge’s dance studios. Although the school day nominally ends at 4, activities do not. There are extra music classes — everybody is urged to learn an instrument — and rehearsals for public shows, notably the school’s annual performance at the Royal Opera House (ROH), in July. These carry on until tea, between 6 and 7pm. Then it’s time for homework and, eventually, bed in a shared dormitory. Lights out for the young ones, like Tom and Grace, is 9pm. For the oldest it’s 10.30.

With breakfast over, tracksuited Tom heads straight to ballet class. Having stripped down to his stretchy T-shirt and tights, he and the other 10 boys in his year work on the finale of the pending ROH show. This is led by White Lodge’s head of ballet, Diane van Schoor, an imperious South African, whose mastery of the vocabulary of classical ballet makes her sound like an over-caffeinated French teacher. Her commands are machinegun bursts of “plié, yes, chassé, now relevé, then croisé, écarté, now promenade!” and so on, which leave the boys panting for their water bottles. The girls, who join them later, are more poised and surer-footed. Van Schoor’s attitude is highly professional. “Always remember, time is money,” she admonishes her perspiring gang. “You must learn fast because that’s how it is in the world out there. Ballet companies never have enough time to rehearse.”

Back in her beautifully appointed office — “the Queen Mother always said this was her favourite drawing room!” — van Schoor reflects on changes in the world of ballet education. The most noticeable of which has been its growing popularity with boys. Is this the Billy Elliot effect?

“Oh, absolutely!” she declares. According to van Schoor, the wildly popular true story of a northern lad who becomes a ballet star was based on that of a colleague of hers at the Royal Ballet, its artistic co-ordinator, Philip Mosley. “Until five years ago we used to struggle to find enough boys. Now it’s 50/50.”

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