BRITAIN’S highest-profile clergyman has embarked on his latest venture – setting up a school named after himself as part of Labour’s city academies programme.

John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, is closely involved in the establishment of the Archbishop Sentamu academy, a Christian school for 1,550 pupils in east Hull.

Advertisements have now been placed for a principal, who will be paid a six-figure sum. Sentamu intends the academy to teach the children of Hull “to change the world”.

The project has the strong support of John Prescott, the local MP and former deputy prime minister. Lord Adonis, the schools minister, has given initial government approval and visited the site in October.

It is a rare accolade for a living cleric to have a school named after him and the move is testament to Sentamu’s high public profile. Usually clergymen must be dead to receive such an honour – one of the schools being incorporated into the Sentamu academy is named after Thurstan, a 12th-century Archbishop of York.

Sentamu, who earlier this month cut up his dog collar live on television in protest at the despotism of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, has launched a £1.5m fundraising drive for the academy. He told an audience in Hull recently the school would be “fantabulous” and that he wanted pupils’ heroes to be “saints, not pop stars or gang leaders”.

In a letter to applicants for the principal’s job, Sentamu writes: “I want them [the pupils] to change the world. What better place to start than William Wilberforce’s town – here in Hull?” Campaigning by Wilberforce, a local MP, helped lead to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

The archbishop continues: “As we Africans say, now as an African Yorkshireman, ‘It takes the whole village to raise, nurture and educate a child’. It will take the whole of east Hull to educate a child at the Archbishop Sentamu academy.”

The academy will open next year on the site of the Thurstan school and will be housed in new buildings by 2011.

City academies, of which the government plans to build 400 by 2010, were originally designed to bypass councils that had run poor-quality education by setting up schools run by private sponsors.

The programme has been dogged by controversy over the sponsors, however, culminating in last year’s police “cash for honours” investigation.

Labour backbenchers and teaching unions have also protested at the lack of local government “accountability”.

Since Gordon Brown became prime minister, councils have been allowed to become more closely involved in schemes.

The syllabus at the Sentamu academy, which is sponsored by the York diocese, has not yet been decided, but it will have a strong Christian ethos. It will specialise in science, with qualifications slanted to the requirements of local NHS employers. The diocese and Hull council are both involved in designing the curriculum.

The academy is part of a £300m plan for revival of the city, the ninth poorest local authority area in Britain.

A total of 138 homes will be demolished to make way for the school. Residents are being rehoused, mostly in the surrounding area. Allotments will also have to be built over and replaced elsewhere.

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