British secondary education is to be led into the choppy waters of the 21st century by admirals. Like Nelson 201 years ago, they will command captains who respect but do not fear them. The captains, in turn, will guide their ships (or schools) without undue inter- ference from above, but with an enthusiasm and dedication that will, with luck, be reciprocated from below.

With only minor embellishments, this is the nautical analogy chosen by Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, for a speech that he will deliver today on how to revive the country’s worst secondary schools. It is not an analogy he will want to take much farther, given the misery endured by some of those press-ganged on to His Majesty’s 19th-century warships, but it identifies a salient truth behind the stubborn failure of one in six secondary schools to offer their 400,000 pupils a remotely satisfactory education.

With control over budgets, hiring and, increasingly, admissions policies, head teachers have the power to transform failing schools, as has been shown, though not always, with the introduction of city academies in often desperate areas. Yet 1,500 schools are without permanent heads, and of those in charge of the 512 secondary schools identified as consistently underperforming, too many lack the dynamism to turn them round.

Sir Cyril’s solution, which is being embraced by ministers, is to broaden the impact of the trust status to be offered to the best schools, by encouraging them to take over nearby failing schools and promoting top head teachers to become chief executives of the resulting partnerships. He cites two case studies to support the strategy. In one, the Waverley School in Birmingham recorded a nearly fivefold increase in eighteen months in the number of pupils achieving at least five good GCSEs, after being taken over by a partnership led by Sir Dexter Hutt. In the second, the Mallory School in Lewisham went, in one year, from being undersubscribed to 50 per cent oversubscribed after being given a new head teacher, new name (the Knights Academy) and new uniform by a partnership led by the Haberdashers’ Aske’s City Technology College.

New leadership can clearly create a new ethos. Furthermore, the new post of chief executive for several schools constitutes a new rung at the top of the educational career ladder that may prove challenging enough to draw in urgently needed talent lower down. But these proposals do not by themselves address the critical shortage of head teachers; nor do they guarantee the extra resources that trust schools will need to expand their franchises. No admiral, however charismatic, can prevail without captains of sufficient quality, or ammunition.

The context for today’s speech is a decade of failure to reform the rump of underperforming secondary schools, and the long-awaited arrival of trust status — a thinly disguised but much needed mechanism for freeing good schools from the dead hand of local authority control. It is right to empower inspirational head teachers to brighten the lives of as many pupils as possible, though this may prove the easiest of Sir Cyril’s proposals to enact. The tougher challenge will be to shut down schools no longer worth maintaining, sometimes in the teeth of community and union resistance. But just as best practice must be spread, worst practice must be ended.