PARENTS are backing Tony Blair’s controversial city academy programme overwhelmingly, according to an independent report that will reveal today that each place is heavily oversubscribed.

The day after a mother failed at the High Court to prevent her children’s Islington primary school being replaced by an academy, a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is expected to show that the semi-independent schools are receiving three times the applicants to places available.

The findings are a “massive vote of confidence” by parents in the Government’s programme to build 200 academies by 2010, Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, told The Times, in spite of criticism by teachers’ unions and Labour leftwingers that they are unaccountable and too expensive.

Twenty-five of the twentyseven academies opened so far are oversubscribed for the next term — more than six times so in the case of new academies in Hackney, Southwark and Lambeth. Mossbourne Community Academy, which replaced the failing Hackney Downs school, has had 1,137 applications for 191 places.

Those academies that had replaced failing or weak schools — even those that were severely criticised or failed by Ofsted, such as Bexley and Unity — were also oversubscribed, though less so.

“No one has ever pretended, least of all the Government, that we’d be able to provide instant success,” Lord Adonis told The Times. “The key issue is the rate of progress, and what the report shows is that we are getting the basics right, the rate of improvement is good and that in particular the leadership of the academies is strong.”

According to the Government, the PwC report finds that results for 14-year-olds are improving faster than in other schools facing similar challenges. The accountants also found that the freedoms enjoyed by the principals of the semi- independent schools had paid off with more innovative teaching.

Since Charles Clarke announced the ambitious education reform programme in 2000, the spotlight has been shone on the new schools, often with uncomfortable results.

Last summer it emerged that although only 42 per cent of state school students who took GCSEs passed five with A*-C grades, including English and maths, at the academies the results were far worse.

At the King’s Academy, 23 per cent of pupils passed at the same rate, while at Unity only 6 per cent achieved similar results, as did 11 per cent at Capital in Brent. Only 14 of the 27 academies had been open long enough for last year’s results to be included, but 7 were in the worst 200.

Lord Adonis said that the Government recognised that more progress needs to be made at GCSE level, but while many of the schools were still in the process of being turned around, it was striking that parents wanted to send their children to them.

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