The new head of Britain’s biggest teaching union has called for the private education system to be nationalised.

Bill Greenshields, incoming president of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), said such a move would improve state education and make it fairer.

The NUT, the most left-wing of the teaching unions, has long been hostile to independent education and to Labour’s programme of setting up academies with private-sector sponsors to replace failing schools.

But Greenshields’s comments to the union’s annual conference in Manchester yesterday went one step further.

“Let’s consider our own direction of travel – from private to public, towards bringing all schools into the state sector,” he said. “Then we would soon see some urgent improvements in our state system.”

In a further sign of confrontation with the government’s education policy, teachers at the conference have also threatened industrial action over class sizes and inadequate pay.

Greenshields, an English teacher from Derbyshire, said the union was monitoring Gordon Brown’s “aspiration” of bringing funding for state schools into line with the levels enjoyed by the private education sector.

Independent schools educate fewer than 7% of pupils, and achieve far higher average grades than the state sector and account for nearly half the entrants to Oxford and Cambridge.

Lord Adonis, the schools minister, is encouraging a number of independent schools to become sponsors of academies, a move led by Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington college, in Berkshire. Adonis has said he wants the educational “DNA” of private schools in the state system.

Greenshields, 56, quoted a speech in which Seldon referred to educational “apartheid” between the independent and state sectors.

While the union leader advocated nationalisation to bridge this gap, Seldon said this weekend that Greenshields “ought to check his facts”.

Seldon said the gulf had arisen from “the success of the independent sector contrasting with the failure of the state school experiment, which has failed to provide what needs to be provided.

“The gap is wider than ever despite 10 years of the most intense attention from the top”, he said. “The solution is not nationalisation but for every state school to be given independence.”

- ONE in five teachers had to deal with pupils carrying knives, guns or drugs at school last year, a report has found.

A study by Warwick university of 1,500 teachers found schools in both rural and urban areas where pupils were arming themselves with weapons for "protection". It also found "significantly more" teachers encountered pupils dealing drugs on a monthly and weekly basis than seven years ago.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT), which commissioned the study, said schools should be "weapon-free zones". Steve Sinnott, the union's general secretary, said: " The idea of bringing knives or guns into schools is totally, utterly unacceptable. Senior leaders in all schools need to get that message across very clearly to every single youngster. "

The study also found a third of teachers had been attacked by pupils while 70% ha d witnessed pupils attacking each other. One in five teachers said they experience abusive comments on a weekly basis.

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