Sir Cyril Taylor champions the specialist school movement

Sir Cyril Taylor, chair of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, urged formal ties using the government's planned trust status.

Trusts are the most controversial aspect of the current education bill.

Sir Cyril told the Times Educational Supplement this would help transform 272 schools with "appalling" results.

These are the schools where less than 25% of pupils get the equivalent of five good GCSE grades.

Vacancies

He said poor performance was "not always the school's fault".

They were often in deprived areas and had many pupils whose first language was not English.

Being unpopular, they had vacancies and ended up with children excluded from other schools.

Some 85% of secondaries have become specialists - which involves finding a sponsor and making a bid to specialise in a particular subject.

But of the other 450 non-specialists, 272 were low-performing, Sir Cyril said.

'Inspiring'

"How can we help these under-performers, which educate a total of 250,000 children, obtain specialist school status and thus avoid a two-tier system of secondary education?

"Some will become academies. The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust strongly recommends that the remaining underperformers be formally linked with a high-performing specialist school using the new proposed trust framework," he wrote.

Sir Cyril said that, at a recent gathering of 150 outstanding school leaders, "virtually every one of them" expressed support for the idea.

As an "inspiring" example, he cited the way the successful and popular Haberdashers' Aske's CTC in Bromley is partnering the previously underperforming Malory school, transforming its ethos and pupils' attitudes and attendance.

Both are now academies, supervised by a single non-profit charitable trust set up by the Haberdashers Livery Company.

But this illustrates one of the problems the government has had in persuading people of the need for trust schools - the fact that anything they could do can already be done anyway.

'Mistaken'

Critics of the government's plans, including many backbench MPs, have said a two-tier system would be caused by the trusts - with more freedoms than council-run schools.

Former Labour leader Lord Kinnock said during a Lords debate on the bill that trust schools would perpetuate social and education differences.

The government thought achievement could be boosted by having more types of schools and operating a market governed mainly by interests outside schools and local communities, he said.

"Each component of that doctrine is mistaken," said Lord Kinnock.

Ministers say that by empowering schools to formalise relationships with local partners, trusts would help them raise standards by using the energy and talent in voluntary groups, charities, universities and business foundations.