Education secretary Michael Gove has slammed ‘obstructive’ local authorities opposed to turning failing primary schools into academies.

In a speech given at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham college, Mr Gove said that most local authorities were being ‘cooperative and constructive’ with the programme but some were being ‘ideologues’ and ‘enemies of reform’.

Mr Gove said schools should stop seeing the ‘arrival of expertise’ as a threat.

Mr Gove said: ‘They are putting the ideology of central control ahead of the interests of children. They are more concerned with protecting old ways of working than helping the most disadvantaged children succeed in the future.

Academies are funded by the state but run independently from local authority control. There are now 1,529 open in England including 37 local authority areas where over half of secondary schools are academies.

‘Anyone who cares about social justice must want us to defeat these ideologues and liberate the next generation from a history of failure.’

He added: ‘Defenders of the status quo say these schools shouldn’t be judged in this way because they have a different approach-they are creative or inclusive. But you can’t be creative If you can’t read properly and speak fluently- you can’t be included in the world of work if you aren’t numerate.

‘The same ideologues who are happy with failure - the enemies of promise - also say you can’t get the same results in the inner cities as the leafy areas so it’s wrong to stigmatise these schools.’

Mr Gove said schools should stop seeing the ‘arrival of expertise’ as a threat to progress and cited the London Borough of Haringey as an example where he was asked ‘not to challenge the leadership’ of the lowest performing schools in the borough.

Haringey;s Deputy leader for Children, Cllr Lorna Reith, said: ‘Of course we realise how important a good education is to our children, which is why we will not accept under-performance and are working with our schools to secure rapid improvement.

‘The decision to convert to an academy is one that should be made by the school itself following proper consultation with parents, who need to be convinced it is the right solution not simply told it is.’