The 600 worst-performing secondary schools in the country face being taken over by the best or shut down completely under a new drive by the Prime Minister to improve classroom standards.

Gordon Brown laid out his vision for education, saying that he wanted to raise educational aspirations across the board to ensure 100 per cent success for young people and close the social-class gap in school attainment.

His priorities include the introduction of cash incentives worth about £10,000 to attract teachers into the toughest schools and a drive to increase the take-up of apprenticeships. Although he recognised improvements in schools in the past decade, the Prime Minister said that there was still much to do. “This is a determined and systematic agenda to end failure,” he said. “We will see it through. We will not flinch from the task.”

Mr Brown raised the bar for school performance. Previously the Government expected a minimum of 25 per cent of pupils to get five GCSEs at grade C or above. Now schools will be expected to ensure that at least 30 per cent of pupils do so.

The number of schools below this level has declined from 1,600, when Labour came to power in 1997, to 670 today, but this was still too many. Schools that fall below this threshold will be given annual improvement targets. The worst among them may face “complete closure or takeover by a successful neighbouring school in a trust or federation, or transfer to academy status, including the option of takeover by an independent school”.

Mr Brown said that he wanted to ensure that every 18-year-old was either headed for university with good academic qualifications or ready to go to work with vocational qualifications.

As part of a drive to increase the number of apprenticeships from 130,000 today to 400,000 by 2020, employers will receive £3,000 for every apprentice they take on. A clearing service to match aspiring apprentices with businesses would be introduced and there would be a guarantee of an apprenticeship place in every local authority for everybody who wants one.

A new scheme called Teach Next will be set up to attract leading people from other professions into teaching. Those working in the toughest schools will be given “golden hello” payments that could be worth at least £10,000, and all teachers will be encouraged to update their qualifications.

Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, said that the floor target of 30 per cent good GCSE grades, including maths and English, was not the right approach. “Mr Brown has not addressed the question of how the children in the worst-performing schools get there,” he said. “If some schools end up with high levels of children from low incomes, they may be doing a very good job with those children but still not meeting the criteria.”

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, agreed: “Improvement trends, not just raw results, must be taken into account when judging the performance of teachers and schools.”

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