Ministers will step up pressure on independent schools this week to earn tax breaks worth £100 million a year by encouraging them to become sponsors of new academy schools or to convert to academy status themselves.

The move is likely to infuriate some private schools, who fear that feepaying parents will not tolerate large sums of school money propping up failing state schools and turning them into academies.

But Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, is keen to ensure that the nation’s best schools and universities share their “educational DNA” and expertise with local state schools that opt out of local authority control and gain academy status.

Far from distracting independent schools from their core purpose, ministers believe such partnerships will enrich the sponsor schools as well, by providing their pupils with opportunities to mix with children from different backgrounds. The move will also put paid to one of the early criticisms of the academy programme, notably that it relied on sponsorship from business leaders who often had very little expertise in education.

The academies programme, designed to turn round failing inner city schools by freeing them from council control, initially required private sponsors to put up £2 million before the Government would agree to fund the remaining £25 million or so needed.

Lord Adonis will outline his views tomorrow at the annual conference of Headmasters and Headmistresses in Bournemouth, where he will publish a prospectus on academies and independent schools. He is expected to confirm that the Government will drop the requirement for cash sponsorship of academies in return for a promise from schools, colleges and universities that they will provide expertise.

Lord Adonis will also encourage more independent schools to follow the lead of the William Hulme School in Manchester and Belvedere School in Liverpool, which last month converted from private to academy status, dropping all selection and fee requirements.

He will also cite the example of Uppingham School in Rutland, which will this week announce a new model of partnership with the academies programme. Under this model, a number of the school’s alumni have each agreed to sponsor or co-sponsor a separate academy.

The involvement from independent schools would help them to fulfill a new requirement from the Charity Commission that they offer a “public benefit” in return for charitable status and the tax breaks that go with it.

The commission said last night that it would “go nuclear” on schools that failed to meet charity standards. Rosie Chapman, an executive director, told the Financial Times that it could remove trustees and freeze bank accounts if a school “keeps failing to meet the targets and doesn’t want to work with us”.

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