This article asks why classical music in the UK, which is consumed and practiced by the middle and upper classes, is being used as a social action program for working-class children in British music education schemes inspired by El Sistema. Through exploring the discourse of the social benefits of classical music in the late nineteenth century, a particular classed and gendered morality in relation to music can be traced that has parallels today. This paper argues, first, that classical music education fits with a middle-class disposition by rewarding investment in a future self; second, that it cultivates an ideal of hard work as a moral project; and third, that classical music allows young women to perform a "respectable" female identity. UK Sistema-inspired programs, in drawing on Victorian ideas of the "civilising influence" of culture, symbolise hope for the continuation of the bourgeois social project into the future.