William Hulme’s Grammar School in Manchester is to scrap its selective admissions test and abolish annual fees of £7,472 in exchange for state funding as an academy.

It is the first member of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) of 245 top independent schools to opt in to the state sector. The school and its junior department will become an academy for pupils aged 3 to 18 in September next year after negotiations with the Department for Education and Skills (DfES).

The decision is a boost for Tony Blair’s plan to open 200 academies by 2010 and to draw independent schools into the maintained sector.

Stephen Patriarca, the head teacher at William Hulme’s, said that he sought academy status after reading Mr Blair’s White Paper plan to create “trust” schools run by private sponsors independently of local authorities. “I wrote to the DfES to say that I thought it was an enlightened document that was taking education forward because it enhanced a move towards the privatisation of education,” Mr Patriarca told The Times.

“If the trust schools go ahead we are talking about wholesale privatisation, and in my view that is a good thing. This is like the models that already exist in highly successful education systems in Europe, where they don’t have this apartheid between private and public sectors.”

William Hulme’s, which opened in 1887, is returning to the state sector as a former direct grant school that went independent in 1976, when the Labour Government of the day abolished the status. As self-governing schools funded by the state, academies represent in effect a revival of the direct grant concept.

Mr Patriarca said that the school would continue to select 10 per cent of pupils by aptitude in modern languages, its proposed specialist subject. Governors at the school sent letters to parents over the weekend to inform them of the decision. Mr Patriarca said that the coeducational school would expand from 500 to 800 pupils as an academy and it would be able to serve families who had previously been deterred by the fees in an area of south Manchester with high levels of deprivation.

William Hulme’s follows the Belvedere School in Liverpool in leaving the fee-paying sector to become a non-selective academy in 2007, while the former head teachers of two other private schools have chosen to take charge of academies.

The Right Rev Peter Hullah, a former head teacher of Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, was appointed last month as principal of the Northampton Academy, and Fiona Cordeaux will lead the United Learning Trust’s new academy in Walthamstow, East London, which officially replaces McEntee comprehensive in September. She previously ran St Dunstan’s College in southeast London.

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