THE National Union of Teachers is to set up hit squads of activists to fight government plans to open 200 city academies.

The union voted unanimously yesterday to send teams of officials to oppose efforts to establish academies in place of underperforming comprehensives.

Delegates at its annual conference in Gateshead backed calls for the union to initiate “action strategies” at any school that is identified as a candidate for conversion into an academy.

Tony Blair has pledged to open 200 academies by 2010 at a cost of £5 billion. Each has a private sponsor who is given control of the governing body and influence over the curriculum in return for a contribution of £2 million towards the building costs. There are 17 academies at present, mainly in deprived urban areas.

The Government is investing an average of £25 million to build each school and would pay the running costs. It describes academies as “state-funded independent schools” because they operate outside of local authority influence.

The NUT, however, attacked the Government’s policy as a fundamental threat to state education and accused Mr Blair of paving the way for schools to be run for profit.

It said that schools were being turned over to fundamentalist Christians, merchant banks and millionaire businessmen without any public accountability. Delegates voted to send activists to campaign at each of the 200 sites identified for academies. Jasper Conran, the designer, and Sir Peter Vardy, a millionaire car dealer and evangelical Christian, have already pulled out of plans to sponsor academies in Waltham Forest, East London, and Doncaster after local protests.

The union’s motion said that academies deprived other local schools of funding to improve facilities and creamed off the most able children in an area.

They were “a form of privatisation” that enabled church organisations and business people to take control of state schools. Liam Conway, from Nottinghamshire, said: “It is a scandal that capitalists of any kind, let alone Christian fundamentalists like Vardy, can gain control of a school for a mere 8 per cent of the capital cost with no payment of running costs whatsoever.”

Alan Bradley, from Westminster, who proposed the motion, said central government was pressuring local authorities to accept academies or lose out on money for rebuilding schools. He said: “Some very shady operators are eyeing up our schools.”

The Government now faces united opposition from unions. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers condemned academies as a “Trojan Horse” for privatisation of state schools at its conference last week, and the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers is also hostile.

The Commons Education and Skills Select Committee, which has a Labour majority, called this month for ministers to halt the programme until they could demonstrate that academies represented the best use of £5 billion. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, has insisted that she will press on with the policy.

• Activists at the National Union of Teachers won a change in the rules yesterday to make it easier to call strikes in schools. The union’s leadership has always been able to head off militancy, but the annual conference supported a call for the union to take industrial action if it is supported by a simple ballot majority.

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