By Gary Eason Education editor, BBC News website, at the NUT conference

Judy Moorhouse said the cost of academies was a "massive waste"

Teachers' leaders have called on the government to divert �5bn from independent city academies to schools in the most deprived areas of England.

The incoming president of the National Union of Teachers, Judy Moorhouse, said the estimated cost of the scheme was "a massive waste."

She challenged the education secretary to share it out, letting schools and their communities decide how best to raise standards free from "obnoxious interference".

The government argues that academies are improving education quickly in poor parts of the country where nothing else has worked.

But Ms Moorhouse said community schools would remain "democratically accountable" - unlike academies and the "trust schools" proposed in the current education bill.

Founding aims

The new president is a secondary school special needs teacher in a comprehensive in Richmond, North Yorkshire. She also chairs the General Teaching Council for England.

She was addressing the NUT's annual conference, being held in Torquay in Devon .

She recalled one of the union's original aims from when it was founded in 1870.

This was "freedom from obnoxious interference" in the running of schools.

She accused the government of being keen to encourage such interference by unwelcome individuals and pressure groups.

She called on the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly - "as a committed Labour politician" - to battle for "the total abolition of selection by ability".

City academies are a cornerstone of the government's education reforms

She said Ms Kelly should go beyond the new ban on admissions interviews by outlawing auditions, oral and practical tests for selection by "aptitude".

"Guaranteed fair access and an end to selection would help all of us in our joint enterprise to reduce underachievement," she said.

"But now I truly am in the realms of fantasy," she added.

The government's target is to have 200 academies by 2010.

Sponsors put in �2m in return for control of how the school is run within national guidelines.

The government puts in typically another �25m of capital and pays the running costs.

Earlier the NUT general secretary, Steve Sinnott, also argued for more widespread support for struggling schools.

'Popular with parents'

He told journalists the union wanted to mobilise parents against academies as well as trust schools - which enjoy some academy-like freedoms and have external partners but not the financial sponsorship.

He was asked how realistic that was when - as the government points out - academies were generally very popular with parents and their results were rising.

He said he could see the scenario where a school did not have good results, had problems and "slum buildings".

"To say to the parents, 'we wish you to oppose having �30m spent on your school' - that's a difficult argument to put across," he conceded.

But the government should target some 300 schools that needed support, stable staffing and the sort of independent-sector smaller class sizes that Chancellor Gordon Brown had identified in his Budget speech.

"That would inspire the nation's teachers and would have the full support of parents," he said.