It’s 9 p.m. in London’s Soho Theatre when the evening’s sold-out headliner takes the stage.

“We’re sitting here together on the cold floor of the school hall,” intones James B Partridge as he strides past an array of vintage 1990s props: a school desk, a Furby, a xylophone, and a Tamagotchi. “The smell of yesterday’s school dinners is hanging in the air,” he continues.

Then the elementary school music teacher sits down at an electric keyboard and plays his first notes.

Why We Wrote This

Nothing says social cohesion quite like a theater full of British millennials singing along to the hymns they all learned in elementary school assemblies.

The crowd of 30-somethings in front of him goes wild.

The U.K.’s fragmented school systems have one common anchor point. All state-funded schools i

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