A MILLIONAIRE has announced plans to “bribe” parents and children in one of the poorest parts of England to regularly attend school.

Irvine Laidlaw, who has a personal fortune of £500 million, intends to offer affordable restaurants, healthcare and adventure training courses to persuade people in Newcastle to back his plans to fund a controversial new city academy.

Lord Laidlaw said that he wants to create “not just a school, but a community centre,” and “to give something back” to children with a less fortunate start than himself.

His plans have been condemned by union leaders and Jim Cousins, Labour MP for Newcastle Central, who said that he feared the scheme would exacerbate social exclusion and hand the community’s control of its education to a “benevolent dictator”.

City academies are a controversial government scheme to replace failing schools with high-tech, multimillion-pound ventures, backed by private-public sponsorship. Each school costs about £25 million to build, double the cost of a comprehensive, and is beyond council control once set up.

Lord Laidlaw, 61, had hoped to fund a similar project in Scotland but was thwarted by hostile teaching unions concerned about the influence of private sponsors over public schools.

Now his focus is West Gate Community College in Newcastle, where 33 languages are spoken, 60 per cent of pupils get free school meals and 43 per cent are registered as special needs. “I’d like to give something back to a community which has not had such a fortunate start and I feel that a city academy is a good way of doing it,” he said. Lord Laidlaw aims to regenerate the community with the 1,750-strong school by providing a restaurant with healthy, affordable meals and healthcare facilities on site. School uniforms would be mandatory, teachers would do exchanges and pupils go on adventure training courses.

“They may not be able to fund all that from revenue grants, so as a sponsor I’d be prepared to help. In taking on a school you take on more than just providing education, you must ensure they’re on healthy diets and so on,” he said.

In four years, Jim Farnie, the headmaster of West Gate College, has turned it around. About a third of pupils this year have achieved an A-C grade in five GCSEs compared with just 8 per cent in 2000. He is a hesitant supporter of the changes which will mean closing his school and moving to new premises in September 2008.

Today parents will receive a letter spelling out the offer, but Mr Farnie says that most seem happy with the plans. “I have talked to a couple whose view is that if a state-of-the-art school is to be built in the west end of Newcastle, they would like their kids to be part of it.”

The plan for an IT business enterprise academy to prepare students to run their own business as well as following academic courses will be debated by the city council next month.

Mr Cousins fears the loss of community control over the new school and that the vocational emphasis may duplicate the work of a local further education college. “I don’t write the script, I look at the script given and this script is not good enough for me or Newcastle. It will compound social division, not help it,” he said.

This summer, the Government committed itself to building 200 city academies by 2010. However, in a recent survey, more than half the 113 councils not involved in a city academy project said that they would not wish to take part. Last year four of the twelve academy heads left their posts citing too much pressure to get results.

The Government has spent about £425 million on 17 academies. Private sponsors invest around £2 million, which gives them the right to half the seats on the board of governors and a say in how the school is run.

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