Weak teachers who are “hardened blockers of progress” should be forced out or sacked, a government adviser says in a book on how to improve failing schools.

He uses unpublished research commissioned by ministers which says that strong schools should “saturate” and “reprogramme” their underperforming neighbours. In Achieving More Together, Robert Hill, who was an adviser to Charles Clarke when he was Education Secretary and to Tony Blair at No 10 and who now works as an independent consultant, claims that failing schools had sometimes met with kneejerk reactions from government and that the success of such initiatives had been mixed.

Now leading head teachers have written to Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, arguing that the book’s proposals should be widely adopted. John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that the Government should pay heed to its own evidence. “Because we consider the research papers to be so instructive we are calling for them to be put into the wider public domain.

“We know that school-to-school support is one of the most effective ways of helping schools that are struggling or underperforming,” Mr Dunford said. “It produces faster improvement and is much more cost-effective than discredited approaches.”

In his book, being published by the association, Mr Hill advocates “a form of shock therapy” to transform poor schools by pairing them with strong partners. Research by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, showed that the stronger school should “saturate the weaker school with its leadership, confront the underlying problems and identify blockers of progress,” he said.

He criticised other strategies promoted by the Government, adding: “The irony is that for some considerable time the answer as to what to do about weak schools has been there and known about within the department. It has been a well-kept secret. At the heart of the solution lie partnerships between schools.”

Mr Hill said that the best federations involved strong establishments making life difficult for obstructive teachers at failing schools.

“They will identify staff who are, in effect, hardened blockers of progress and deal with them,” he said. “In some cases, individuals in the underperforming school will recognise that the expectations and pace are too much for them and leave without the need for formal procedures. But others may have to be persuaded or required to go.

“During this time there will be a support team from the lead school: they will ‘saturate’ the partner school to bring about rapid changes of mindset.”

He said that the department’s researchers “describe the process as ‘wiping the memory of the partner school and reprogramming it’.”

The book asks why “the Government is not making greater use of support federations and putting them up in lights along with academies, as a way of raising standards and attainment”. Mr Hill cites successful partnerships. One of them involved Shenley Court, which had been a failing school in Birmingham that was put into special measures.

He said: “Drawing on colleagues from neighbouring schools, Shenley Court was flooded with experienced staff. The [existing] staff were shellshocked and demoralised. In the end, two deputy heads, two assistant heads, three heads of department and the head of sixth form all went.”

The school has now improved significantly.

Mr Hill said there were clear lessons to be learnt on the value of support federations, adding: “Good schools with able staff, clear systems and a strong commitment to developing high quality teaching and learning have a major role to play in improving standards of education.

“The Government’s rhetoric and practice need to move away from seeing the performance of individual schools in isolation. Rather than celebrating the performance of one school while others around it struggle or languish, the objective of education policy should be to have all schools moving forward together.”

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