On a cold Tuesday night in September, 1,000 people are gathering in a barn the size of an aircraft hangar outside Birmingham. In the queue, there’s a man covered in blue denim from Stetson to cowboy boots whose spurs rattle as he walks. He looks the part, but when he opens his mouth, the drawl is Brummie - more West Bromwich than Wild West. They are all here to see Monty Roberts. Outside, one of the volunteers who is putting up signs directing the curious, stops what he is doing and says, quietly: “In the horse world he’s a bit of a god.”

Monty Roberts is also gaining something of a reputation in the world of education as schools start to apply his techniques in the classroom. Down the road from tonight’s performance, in Solihull, his theories on non-confrontational human relationships have been credited with turning round a failing primary school.

Back in the barn, the warm-up music - classic western themes, a bit of Rawhide segueing into High Chaparral - fades and the night’s star attraction appears. A big bear of a man with a gentle smile, he acknowledges the applause and walks into the fenced pen at the centre of the arena. “Practically everybody here has read or heard something about me,” he begins. “That’s just the way it is today. But there won’t be one horse who comes through that gate tonight that has read or heard anything about me.”

The first horse to enter the arena is a handsome animal called Socks. Like a magician about to perform a trick, Monty asks Socks’s owner if they have ever met. He needs to rule out any collusion because what follows is so magical as to beggar belief. But it is not a trick.

Socks is a “starter”, meaning he has never been ridden. In fact, he has never had anything on his back. He is wild - in the top 5 per cent of untrained horses, Monty says later. Socks starts to run round the pen, first one way then the other, as Monty throws a line softly on to his back and kicks up sawdust and dirt, the man imitating a predator. After a couple of minutes, Socks realises he is not in danger and starts to chew and lick his lips, just as Monty said he would. Then he stops, drops his head to the ground. “That means, ‘if we could have a meeting to renegotiate this deal, I’ll let you be chairman’.”

Then the magic begins. Monty stands sideways on and walks slowly towards Socks, avoiding eye contact. Then Socks turns towards him, and Monty scurries away. This is not the action of a predator, the horse thinks. The third time he does this, something incredible happens. Socks begins to follow Monty across the ring, his head almost resting on his shoulder. In eight minutes, wild horse and civilised man have made friends, achieving what Monty calls join-up.

He signals for Grant, his rider, to bring a saddle and bridle, which he drops in the centre of the ring. By now the audience is watching with hushed awe. As if to lighten proceedings, Monty begins an imaginary, jokey dialogue with the horse.

“What’s that Mr Roberts?” “It’s a saddle.”

“I don’t like saddles. My uncle told me about them. He said people put them on your back and they tickle. If that belt tickles me I’m gonna kill that saddle.”

“Don’t talk that way, Socks.”

“It’s not just talk. I mean it. If you put that on me, I’m gonna hurt it.”

Sure enough, when Monty puts the saddle on, Socks starts to buck around the ring.

“Are you trying to get into the rodeo?” “Mr Roberts, don’t make fun of me. I’m gonna buck it off.”

But, within 10 minutes, Socks is carrying Grant around the ring. “Horses are stupid - that’s what they said for 2,000 years. Look at this young horse. Look at him learn. It’s amazing.” Monty Roberts has done this routine thousands of times. It’s second nature to him. It’s the reason he is famous. But it is not his raison d’etre.

During the evening, he will “join up” with five horses, gently cure them of habits of biting and bucking and refusing to go into boxes or through gates, without laying a finger on them except to pat their noses. But, incredible though this is, it is a sideshow.

Monty’s main concern these days is to apply his non-violent non-confrontational methods to human relationships, to revolutionise the way we communicate. “These are the most precious relationships,” he says. “Every human being is more precious than all the horses I have worked with.”

Like horses, children are flight animals, meaning that when threatened they flee. Except that our predatory ancestry means we put up with a lot more abuse before we run. “Each of the animals that comes in that pen is just like a child,” says Monty. “They have the same needs. They want trust, they want to be able to trust, they want safety and some love. They don’t want to be hurt.”

Monty and his wife Pat have had unique experience of raising children. In addition to their own three, they have fostered 47. These children have arrived, some as young as 11, with drug habits, criminal records for theft or violence and gone away - most of them - changed people. “There have been 40 positive stories and seven negative stories,” says Monty. “I reckon that’s not a bad percentage.”

His philosophy is simple: positive actions reap positive consequences; negative actions incur negative consequences. He encourages parents and children to draw up a series of contracts. They can be verbal or written, in which case both parties should sign. The act of signing, even in children as young as two, gives them a sense of responsibility, he says. Some actions, such as drinking or smoking, are off limits. Children should never rewarded for good behaviour with food or money, but allowed to go on an outing or do a favourite pastime instead. Breaking the contract means a task, but this should be something useful and not a run of the mill job. It is important that the child decides on both the reward and the task and that both parties stick to the deal.

“There’s not a bad kid born,” says Monty. “There’s not a bad horse born. Circumstances and life’s environment is what makes us either bad or good. And teachers have been the most important part of our sociological order since the beginning of time, because they represent what our future will be.”

Kingshurst primary school is in Solihull, a suburb of Birmingham usually described as leafy, one of the most middle-class enclaves in the Midlands. This part of it is anything but. Forty per cent of pupils at Kingshurst receive free school dinners and 50 per cent are on the special needs register. But in the past few years something remarkable has happened here. In 1995, Kingshurst was put into special measures; 18 months later it was taken out of them, and today it is a beacon school.

Stephen Taylor is a Year 6 teacher at the school. He’s a local boy - he can point across the playing fields to where he used to live - and he came to Kingshurst as a child. “I had such a great time when I was here,” he says. “I was always a struggler, a plodder. I wanted to come back and help those children that were having the same difficulties that I had had.” But by the time he returned as a teacher, 12 years ago, it wasn’t as he remembered it. Even now, the area has problems. This morning, he has received news that a 20-year-old former pupil has died of a heroin overdose. “I could show you a pub down the road that closed because of drug dealing,” he says sadly.

Mr Taylor is an animal lover. He has two dogs, chickens and a cat and he rides horses. So he was naturally interested when he saw Monty Roberts on a television programme. Afterwards he went out and bought a tape of his book Join Up - Horse Sense for People.

“When people ask me how I teach I have never been able to put it into words. But I met the headteacher who first employed me recently and he said, ‘the thing I always remember about you is you were always looking for different ways to do things’. I remember listening to Monty’s book on tape while I was ironing and I thought ‘that’s what I do’. I want people to join up with me and follow me.”

He approached his headteacher, Jeff Darby. Conditions at the school were so bad that they needed to try something radical. “When I came to this school it was the pits; it was a sink school. There was low morale. Nobody wanted to come and work in Kingshurst. Behaviour was extremely poor.”

Then staff began to apply Monty’s ideas. They showed the children videos of Monty working with the horses. They began negotiating disciplinary contracts with the children, agreeing on individual target cards for behaviour and work. “The children fully understood it straight away,” says Mr Taylor. “It takes an awful lot of pressure off me as a teacher. It doesn’t make discipline a personal thing.”

They changed their teaching methods too, adding elements of accelerated learning and neuro-linguistic programming to their classroom practice. “But Monty’s work has added an extra dimension,” says Jeff Darby. “It’s another way of getting the message across about respecting others. Responsibility is the key. We work with the kids, tell them they are responsible for their own learning, their behaviour and their actions. It has given us a big lift. The feel-good factor that staff have got from it is quite outstanding.

“People have frowned upon his methods of horse training and he says he’s always having to prove himself.” It was the same with Kingshurst. “The LEA thought we were taking a risk, but I thought if what we are doing isn’t working, let’s do something else,” says Mr Darby. The second inspection justified the switch. “They found there were no key issues. There was nothing wrong with our school.”

Armed with this good news, Stephen Taylor sent an email to Monty in the United States, and was astonished when he replied asking if he could visit the school next time he was in Britain. Which is how this Californian horse trainer came to be standing in the hall at Kingshurst talking to an audience of 100 parents, teachers and local authority officials.

Monty is a charismatic, articulate but modest man. He talks about the youth penitentiaries he visits in the US, how a third of the lifers in one jail signed a petition never to use violence again in their lives after his visit. He shows them the Maori greenstone that hangs around his neck, the symbol of identity and culture that every Maori child wears round their neck, a gift from a young prisoner.

“You are on the cutting edge of being a whole new generation of education,” he tells them. “Maybe you don’t realise that now but in 10, 15 or 20 years from now you’ll see what a change has come.”

He describes his work as a mission to leave the world a better place than he found it. In this corner of the Midlands, where teachers have used his methods to transform the fortunes of this unassuming school, his mission has been accomplished.

Monty’s mottos

* Keep it simple. Simple is best

* Violence is never the answer

* There is no such thing as teaching, only learning

* It is a teacher’s duty to create an environment in which the student can learn

* Always work to cause your horse to follow the path of least resistance.

Then place an opening for him to pass through so that the path of least resistance becomes the direction you want him to go in

* Everyone must be responsible for their own actions and the consequences thereof

* The horse uses a predictable, discernible and effective language. Their language, which I call Equus, is non-verbal

* Non-verbal communication sends very strong messages, not only in the world of the equine and most other animal species, but also among humans

* A good trainer can hear a horse speak to him. A great trainer can hear a horse whisper

“Horses have taught me to understand that if I set a target for a student but become obsessed only with the ultimate goal, I will fall short. On the other hand, if I work in the fashion that the horses have taught me, the goals will be met without force or pressure. Many years ago I concluded that I would detach myself from all outcome, almost as though I was a spectator.

“Although I was the architect of the work process, I never tried to teach horses but instead worked consistently to create an environment in which they could learn for themselves. I eventually discovered that many psychologists and psychiatrists recommended the same approach.

“But the horses have been my teachers as much as I have been theirs. This may be a little like the chicken and egg as to whether humans or horses reached this point of understanding first, but horses are 50 million years old, and humans have been around for a much shorter period of time.”

From Join-Up:Horse Sense for People (HarperCollins). www.montyroberts.com