The Conservatives will today seek to steal a march on Gordon Brown’s commitment to public service reforms with proposals to expand the role of city academy schools.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Children’s Secretary, will announce plans to give powers to city academies to take over neighbouring schools judged to be failing. Independent charitable trusts and cooperative schools set up by parents would also be eligible to take over failing schools.

The proposals, to be announced by Mr Gove in a speech to a think-tank, mark an intensification in the battle between the Tories and Mr Brown over which party will pursue Blairite reforms to the public sector. Before he took over at No 10 Mr Brown was cool towards academy schools and appeared to be ready to limit their scope for innovation by bowing to pressure from within the Labour Party to make them more accountable to local authorities. Mr Brown and Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, have since changed tack and have announced plans to step up the number of academy schools to a target of 400.

But David Cameron, who supported legislation to establish city academies, has sought to cast his party as heir to Tony Blair’s public service reforms.

Mr Gove will suggest that failing schools run by education authorities where Labour has been in power for generations, such as in inner-city London and the party’s northern heart-lands, be taken over by academies and their sponsors.

“We will help new schools set up in areas where local authorities have let parents down,” Mr Gove told The Daily Telegraph. “But in areas where the same party has been in power for too long, and where standards remain poor, we will have the most failing schools transferred to academy sponsors and others who have a proven record of improving education for the poorest.”

Legislation paving the way for such change would be in the first Queen’s Speech of a Conservative administration, he will say when he addresses the liberal think-tank CentreForum’s meeting.

The Conservatives have already proposed that parents be allowed to set up state schools run on a cooperative basis if they are dissatisfied with existing schools run by their local authority.

Mr Gove’s policy is a development from an idea put forward by a Tory policy group on social justice chaired by Iain Duncan Smith, who suggested that schools judged by Ofsted inspectors to be failing should be taken over by charities or parents’ groups.

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