New schools supremo for capital

London is to get its own education commissioner to drive through a "step change" in the quality of schools in the capital, Education Secretary Estelle Morris announced today.

The new figure, reporting direct to the Education Department, would have powers to override the capital's 33 education authorities. Where necessary, senior sources said, the commissioner would be expected to "knock heads together".

Ms Morris wants the commissioner to provide the strategic leadership which many believe London education has lacked since the abolition of the Inner London Education Authority more than a decade ago, when the control of schools passed to individual boroughs. Five of them have since been failed by the Ofsted watchdog.

The radical plan is part of a "London Challenge" launched by Ms Morris today in a search for new policies to improve education in the capital which, she acknowledged, contains some of the country's worst schools as well as some of the best.

Otherwise, she fears, middle-class parents will continue to vote with their feet and abandon state schools. Other initiativesannounced today, in a speech at South Camden Community School, include the creation of London's own "staff college" to train existing heads and the next generation of school leaders.

Ms Morris also announced a £10 million programme to create a centre in each inner-London borough for the education of gifted and talented children. Next year, Ms Morris announced, she is to ask the School Teachers' Review Body to offer more pay bonuses for teachers staying in London schools.

And, as already reported by the Evening Standard, London is to get up to 25 showpiece City Academies, independent state schools which are Labour's latest big idea for boosting inner-city standards.

The search for the new commissioner has already begun and speculation will immediately link Professor Tim Brighouse with the post.

He has recently accepted an academic post at London University's Institute of Education after retiring as Chief Education Officer in Birmingham, which he transformed from one of the worst authorities in the country to one of the best.

Meanwhile, the heads of six leading independent schools - four of them in London - today hit out at "over-testing" and league tables, claiming they have more to do with monitoring teachers than benefiting pupils. In a broad attack on Labour's school reforms, they expressed concern over the "excessive assessment of our pupils and the vacuum in the educational policy which underlies it".

In a letter to The Times, the heads of Dulwich College, St Paul's School, St Paul's Girls' School, King's College School, Guildford High School and King Edward VI High School for Girls in Birmingham said schools were in danger of being turned into "conveyor belts on which pupils pick up credit badges as they move along".

In another move, leading independent schools, including Eton, are planning a mass boycott of this year's A-level and GCSE league tables because of fears about the accuracy of marking. Up to 30 per cent of the 649 schools that normally submit results may hold back grades, pending any appeals.