Questions to be asked and lessons learnt.

LAST spring Ryan Bell was told to leave the South London comprehensive school he attended, or be thrown out. A pupil once thought bright and talented was branded "rude, disruptive and unmanageable". As far as the school was concerned he was unteachable.

Three months later Ryan, now 14, was still looking for a school place. He was one of 300 British children excluded - or expelled, as they called it in my day - from school each week for violent or disruptive behaviour. Four out of five never return to school again.

Ryan is one of the lucky ones. The makers of A Second Chance offered to pay the £15,000-a-year fees for him to become a boarder at Downside, a Catholic boys' school near Bath run by monks. The headmaster, Father Antony Sutch, is a former spiritual advisor to the Princess of Wales.

This documentary - the first of three about excluded children given another chance - raised lots of questions, and not just about the state of our educational system. There would have been no documentary if the makers hadn't paid Ryan's fees. You could say that he's exploiting them as much as they are exploiting him. He benefits by getting a good education at one of the country's top schools for free.

The makers weren't blind to the problem. They called in three experts to assess Ryan's ability to cope with leaving home and living under the glare of the cameras. They judged he would cope. He did even better than they anticipated. At one point the experts were forced to recognise that they were making a bigger deal of having two very different sets of friends - at school and the London estate where his family live - than Ryan himself.

Once you removed the worry that Ryan was a guinea pig in an experiment to see if a troublesome pupil could be reformed, there was much to enjoy and learn from A Second Chance. The failures of the state education system, such as overcrowded classes and lack of individual attention, became clear as Ryan blossomed under the Downside system.

It helped that he was a sensible, intelligent lad - most of the time, a case of graffiti-spraying on London Transport property during the school holidays proved a minor blip - who recognised that he needed to finish his education if he was to fulfill his dream of being a cartoonist or games designer.

From what we saw, the class difference hardly surfaced. Downside pupils accepted him into what Father Sutch regarded a family. His advice to the new pupil was simply put, "Respect other people and yourself". Ryan himself had expected it to be much harder to fit it, but he found "they are average teenagers talking about cars and girls". His friends on the estate were pleased, and a little surprised, to find him unchanged when he came home for the holidays as they thought he'd come back posh.

By the end of term, Ryan was playing for the school at rugby, and coming top of the class in biology and Latin. The final caption told us he was still at Downside and studying for ten GCSEs. The programme will continue to pay his school fees for the next two years. It looks like being money well spent, both in educational and TV terms.