A scheme to recruit top-flight graduates from Britain’s leading universities to teach in inner city schools is to be doubled in size, the Prime Minister will say tonight.

Teach First, has proved so popular among students that five per cent of all Oxford graduates applied to it this year. The 380 places offered on the scheme were at least four times oversubscribed.

Head teachers are so impressed with the way that recruits to the scheme have been able to help turn around underperforming departments, that for every one Teach First trainee, there are now four schools desperate to take them.

Gordon Brown will announce that the scheme would be doubled in size to take in 850 recruits by 2013, making it one the UK’s largest graduate recruiters.

He will deliver the annual lecture of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, in which he will say that Britain’s highest priority now must be building on improvements to education and accelerating social mobility.

Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, said that attracting the finest graduates into teaching was an essential part of the drive to increase social mobility as it would help raise standards in schools situated in deprived areas.

“The great thing about the scheme is that it attracts the highest performing graduates. It’s really important for the state education system that we have strong capacity in this area,” he said.

In the US, the American version of the scheme, known as Teach for America, now attracts applications from 11 per cent of all Yale graduates and seven per cent of Harvard graduates.

“We would like to attracts similar levels from Britain’s leading universities,” Lord Adonis said.

Teach First targets high-achieving students who had not previously considered teaching and places them in some of England's most challenging schools for two years.

Graduates qualify as teachers after one year and those that remain in the profession after two years (usually about half do) are often fast-tracked to senior positions in schools.

Those who leave teaching and move into the corporate sector with one of the major national and international organisations that back Teach First are often also put on a similar fast track to management positions.

A recent review of the scheme by the schools inspectorate Ofsted concluded that TeachFirst trainees had “a notable impact in transforming underperforming departments”, and had raised the aspirations of older staff.

Some schools, which have been signed up to TeachFirst for several years, now have more than ten teachers on their staff who came from the scheme.

Brett Wigdortz, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Teach First, said the Prime Minister’s support would enable it to invest money into the development of its Ambassador programme. This supports its teachers to continue to address educational disadvantage on completion of their initial two year placement.

It will also be able to expand its ‘Teach On’ programme, helping Teach First trainees who stay in schools at the end of two years to move on to school leadership roles.

The expansion would also allow Teach First to work with more businesses, recruit from more universities in more regions and to reach more of the UK’s most disadvantaged children, he said.

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