ED BALLS, the children’s secretary, is to push state and independent schools into closer collaboration by taking part in more joint initiatives such as combined cadet forces and city academies.

He has called 90 leading headteachers from both sectors to a meeting at his department tomorrow to encourage them that they should do more to break down barriers between private and state education.

The Influential Heads Forum will also hear a call from one of its organisers, Richard Cairns, head of Brighton College, for every independent school to include a representative of a state school on its governing body.

The initiative will partly be seen as a shrewd defensive move by independent schools concerned at legal requirements to prove they offer “public benefit” in order to claim charitable status.

Reports from pilot inspections by the Charity Commission into five schools were expected within the next few weeks but are now understood to have been delayed. Schools, however, are worried they will have to undertake costly new initiatives to pass the test just as the recession begins to bite into their pupil numbers and income.

Jim Knight, the schools minister, who will also speak at the conference, has said schools in financial trouble because of the recession may show increased interest in turning themselves into state-funded academies to avert closure. A handful have already done so. The recession has also brought a trickle of private school closures.

Knight said yesterday: “We have encouraged greater cooperation between the sectors and this has recently accelerated with independent schools sponsoring academies and more partnership schemes like the one offering pupils from state schools an opportunity to take part in combined cadet forces (CCF).”

Other independent schools who will be represented include Charterhouse, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, King’s College Wimbledon, Manchester Grammar, Rugby and Wellington.

Headteachers from the state sector include Elizabeth Sidwell, chief executive of the Haberdashers’ Aske’s Federation of schools and the principals of city academies in Bristol, Leicester and the West Midlands.

- The private Brighton College is doubling the number of places available to new pupils entering at the age of 11 after a surge in applications. Richard Cairns, the headmaster, attributes part of the increase to parents worried that the local council’s lottery system for allocating state school places could mean they miss out on their chosen school. The results of this year’s lottery will be announced tomorrow.

He said another reason was “the remorseless decline in the popularity of single-sex girls’ schools which have traditionally been the only private schools admitting at 11.” A local girls’ school, St Mary’s Hall, recently announced its closure.

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