Resignation casts doubt on academies

The senior civil servant responsible for developing the Government's flagship academy schools programme has quit – fuelling new doubts about the future of the scheme.

Sir Bruce Liddington, a former headteacher who had worked on the project since its inception, is leaving only weeks after Lord Andrew Adonis, the former schools minister who was the architect of the academies policy, was shifted to a new job at the transport ministry.

Sir Bruce, 59, is to become director-general of Edutrust, a charity with both Christian and Muslim support, which aims to open 20 academies.

In his current job as the first Schools Commissioner, his brief was to promote choice and diversity within the state education system, but teaching unions said his remit was widely perceived as being about pushing through plans for academies and "trust" schools. Sir Bruce's decision to leave coincides with an admission from the Schools Minister, Jim Knight, that he has not always been a champion of the academies programme pioneered by Tony Blair.

Mr Knight said: "There have been times before I came to the department when I read the reporting, rather than visited the academies, and was to be persuaded," he said in an interview with The Times Educational Supplement.

He also conceded that he might not have enough time to meet every backer of an academy project, as Lord Adonis had managed to do. "There is inevitably an issue as we are moving from 100 academies to 200 and then 400 as to whether a minister can have the same attention to detail for every single project," Mr Knight said. "There will be some change that is a reflection of scale rather than commitment."

However, he stressed: "Since I started visiting and seeing how [academies] worked for children from communities where successive generations have been let down by schools, I am an enthusiastic proponent of them and advocate for them."

Some observers believe that without Lord Adonis's commitment to every academy, it will be more difficult to persuade sponsors to come forward. One local authority expert, commenting on Sir Bruce's resignation, said: "The academies programme will be undermined by it. Andrew Adonis was having weekly and sometimes daily briefings about it, chasing progress. The wheels are likely to come off."

The decision to move Lord Adonis from the education ministry in last month's cabinet reshuffle inevitably fuelled speculation about whether Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, was as committed to academy schools as his junior minister had been.

When he arrived at the department in June last year, Mr Balls announced significant changes to the programme, meaning, in effect, that every proposed academy needed the backing of the local authority before being approved by the Government. Opposition MPs saw this as a watering-down of the original Blairite vision of academies as "independent state schools".

Mr Balls's decision was seen as a means of winning support from left- leaning Labour MPs who opposed academies but would support him in a leadership contest if Gordon Brown quit as Prime Minister. However, others said the decision to remove Lord Adonis from his department would help him to portray himself as one of the Government's modernisers. In the past, any official reference to the academies scheme always added that the peer was its chief architect. Following Lord Adonis's departure, Mr Knight told The Independent a further 70 academies were planned. This would be in addition to the replacement of schools which failed to reach a government target of having at least 30 per cent of pupils obtaining five A* to C grade passes at GCSE by 2010.