In a noisy primary school classroom in East London, 15 very small film buffs are arguing about whether The Red Shoes is better than Duck Soup.

Three of them feel that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's ballet fantasy is the superior work, even though they were too scared to finish watching it. Most of the others preferred the Marx Brothers' 75-year-old knockabout “because it was so funny”.

There is no contest as to the most popular film they have watched through FilmClub, a new nationwide scheme to give children free access to classic films. They all adore Grease.

“They made me rewind it four or five times so they could dance to all the songs again,” said Karen Parker, who helps to run the branch of FilmClub at Lauriston Primary School in Hackney.

That Duck Soup, The Red Shoes and Grease were made in 1933, 1948 and 1978 sails over the heads of the children, who are all aged between 7 and 10 and probably can't remember the first Harry Potter film coming out. Nor are they bothered that Duck Soup is in black and white or that Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, which they still talk about long after seeing it, has subtitles.

Emma Thompson and the film director Alan Parker will help to introduce the scheme tomorrow, but already, up and down the country, hundreds of schoolchildren are watching films that they would otherwise never see and learning that their tastes extend far beyond mainstream blockbusters.

According to Beeban Kidron, the co-founder of FilmClub, many are also discovering far more: a sense of belonging, wonder and personal ambition.

“I've seen at least a dozen kids have a life-changing experience in front of me, a light going on,” she said. “There's one boy I'm thinking of who's in the lower sixth who hadn't made a single friend at school, had lots of problems at home and had basically never seen a film before. Now he's made loads of friends through FilmClub. All he talks about is film, he goes to the cinema every weekend and he's written a screenplay.”

Ms Kidron, the director of Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, set the club up in 2006 with Lindsay Mackie, an educationist, to do something for “all the feral kids running around like lost causes because they have no sense of the big picture. It works. A lot of teachers are saying to us that the ones getting most of it are the difficult kids, and particularly the difficult boys.”

Ms Kidron calls herself “the most hated do-gooder in the industry right now” for the way that she has “battered” her address book to get film stars to visit schools and talk to FilmClubs. Rosamund Pyke, Thandie Newton and Kevin MacDonald have all done visits, as have leading make-up artists, composers and film electricians. Alan Rickman, Sienna Miller and Lord Attenborough are lined up to help soon.

After a pilot scheme last year FilmClub has secured government funding and is being introduced to 7,000 schools over the next three years.

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