THE government is to risk clashes with backbenchers and teaching unions by calling for top public schools to set up their own city academies.

Lord Adonis, the schools minister, will use a speech to headteachers of independent schools next month to encourage them to establish and manage state schools in deprived areas as a way of “going back to their roots” as charitable institutions.

“Academy possibilities are being generally discussed across the independent sector. They are now accepting this as something they should consider,” said Adonis. “I would warmly welcome any successful private school that wants to bring successful management into the state system.”

He added: “For many of them it brings them back to their roots as it enables them to get into deprived communities and not simply to serve the more affluent.”

According to Adonis, more than a dozen independent schools are already at various stages of developing academies in addition to those already named. These include Dulwich College in south London, Tonbridge school in Kent and Wellington college in Berkshire.

The minister also confirmed he is in discussions with three schools about plans to leave the private sector altogether to become city academies. This is in addition to four announced earlier this year.

Separately it emerged this weekend that a wealthy parent at Brighton college in Sussex is putting up £2m sponsorship to enable the school to establish a primary school academy nearby.

Adonis’s call will unsettle some schools. They are concerned that if they do not become more involved in state education it may endanger the tax breaks that go with their charitable status. Next month the charity commission will publish guidelines by which it will judge whether schools are providing sufficient “public benefit” to retain their charitable status.

Adonis has not called for an explicit link between city academies and independent school charitable status but said those taking part would see it as “a factor in how they take forward their charitable missions”.

The wholesale opening of the academy system to independent schools will prove controversial with unions and left-wing Labour MPs. The National Union of Teachers has attacked academies as a form of privatisation of state education. Ken Purchase, Labour MP for Wolverhampton North East, has criticised sponsors of the new schools as “21st century spivs”.

Successful state schools have already been drafted in to help revive poorly performing comprehensives. Cornwallis school, a high-performing comprehensive in Maidstone, Kent, has been turned into an academy from this term and placed in a “federation” with another academy which replaces two poorly performing schools serving deprived areas.

Academies, of which Adonis is seen as the main architect, were first established under Tony Blair as new schools funded from Whitehall but independent of local authorities to revive education in inner city areas. The government has a target of setting up 400.

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